Legendary investor Warren Buffet said it best: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only five minutes to ruin it.” Indeed, a corporate crisis or scandal can cause a company’s fortunes to turn on a dime. But most brand reputations are not shaped by earthquake-like shifts – more often a brand’s reputation evolves through a steady and continuous collection of impressions and experiences. To put it in real terms, one negative review won’t change your company’s fortunes, but 5,000 negative reviews could spell the beginning of the end. 

With the explosion of digital media over the past 20 years, brand reputations can shift and sway at a much faster pace than years ago. The game has changed, and assessing your brand’s reputation requires a more active role. As tightly as you may control how your brand is presented, it will be further shaped by social proof in the form of social media posts, reviews, and blog posts by others. Social proof for your brand is out there – what is it proving? 

Brand reputation management software is essential in today’s environment. These online reputation management tools automate the collection of references to your brand across millions of digital sources to help you form a clear view of your brand’s reputation and stay on top of important trends.

Why brand reputation management is critical

The most savvy Internet reputation management professionals know that reputation management is not a passive task where you simply collect and review what people are saying about your brand and products. There is an active role to play. When you are attentive to the real-time mentions of your brand, you are in a position to act quickly before things spiral. 

Say a customer receives a defective product and posts a nasty comment about your company to their thousands of followers on Twitter. In one scenario, a team of brand marketers watches in horror as others reply and join in on a snowballing hate party. In another scenario, a company representative responds immediately with a sincere apology and an offer to replace the item. In this version, you’ve not only headed off a permanent batch of negative commentary, you’ve increased your customer’s satisfaction while generating a positive impression with all of their followers.

And brand reputation management involves more than just reputational risk. It can even involve the safety of your employees. One company’s brand management team was the first to spot threatening messages on Facebook aimed at their call center staff. 

There are many benefits to be gained from actively listening to your customers in the digital channels they prefer. You can harvest valuable insights into their wants, needs, and pain points. You can see where competitors are gaining an advantage. Ultimately, you can improve customer service and satisfaction. 

Over time you can witness your brand reputation management driving actual sales growth. According to a survey from brightlocal, nearly half of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends and family. Digital channels should be a critical component of the referral network for your business, but it only works if people have positive things to say about your brand.

While the benefits of brand reputation management are many, you won’t get far if all you do is set up a few Google Alerts. You need a software solution that gives you ears everywhere: social networks, review sites, blogs and forums, podcasts, and newsletters. You need a sophisticated brand management tool. 

Core features of brand reputation management tools

Online reputation monitoring software is still an emerging category, and you’ll find that providers offer a broad range of features. One specific type, review management software, has seen a lot of growth in recent years. Providers like Gatherup, ReviewTrackers, Broadly, NiceJob, Trustpilot, ReviewPush, Reputology, and Podium have a variety of features to collect, analyze, solicit and publish reviews on popular review sites. Other tools like Chatmeter, Yext, and Promo Republic help you manage local listings and web publishing. There is also a relevant category of software, consumer intelligence platforms, where you will find some companies offering brand reputation management features while others focus mainly on intelligence gathering.  

While these tools are valuable for several marketing objectives, if we zoom in on what’s needed for brand reputation management, there are some core capabilities required: 

• Tracking brand mentions across social media, review sites, and other digital channels
• The ability to track and compare against competitors 
• Automated sentiment analysis, to assess whether comments are positive or negative
• Flexible options for alerts and notifications
• Translation and multi-language support
• Configurable reports to allow teams to synthesize and share the data
• Roles and profiles to support team collaboration

The list that follows includes software solutions that deliver this full spectrum of brand reputation management features. 

The best tools for effective brand reputation management 

Let’s run through some of the most robust and popular platforms available today for brand reputation management. While this certainly isn’t a complete list, it should be useful for helping you start your research process. 

Brand24 – Brand24 offers a product suited to the specific use case of brand reputation management. The core feature is social media monitoring, complemented by sentiment analysis and detailed reporting with options for filtering or exporting data. The platform integrates with Slack to support team collaboration.

Brandwatch – Acquired by PR firm Cision in 2021, Brandwatch offers a powerful suite of features. It’s Listen module monitors brands across 100 million online sources. It applies AI-based analysis to detect irregular data patterns, ensuring you’re alerted quickly when there is unusual activity.

Meltwater – This brand monitoring tool has been around since 2001. In addition to brand reputation management, the company promotes the benefits of its software for consumer intelligence and sales. One unique feature is audience segmentation, allowing you to profile groups with an affinity for your brand. The company’s clients include Bic and Western Union.

Mention – This company claims to monitor over 1 billion sources daily across the web and social media. Like the other companies profiled, Mention has abilities to deliver alerts and sentiment analysis. The company’s clients include Microsoft and BenQ.

Reputation Resolutions – This company offers a unique, service-based business model that is likely to appeal to brand defenders (e.g. Legal and Compliance teams). They help companies set up brand monitoring solutions, but they also offer concierge-type services. The Reputation Resolutions team has PR specialists, online defamation attorneys, cyber forensic investigators, and search engine specialists that help you manage your publicity through tasks like content removal. 

SentiOne – Founded in 2011, SentiOne combines social listening capabilities with a layer of artificial intelligence. So you get the benefit of social listening – including brand mentions, detailed reports, and sentiment analysis – but can also receive alerts when the AI-based monitoring detects unusual levels of activity around your brand. SentiOne Listen is used by many companies, including Ogilvy and PepsiCo. 

Sprinklr Social – Sprinklr offers a powerful suite of software services. For brand reputation management, they tout their compliance and governance capabilities, helping ensure that social media channels are moderated based on approved processes. They offer integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate content for use in social media channels. 

Talkwalker – This company’s clients include Adidas and Unicef. The platform offers capabilities for listening and alerts, as well as a video analytics tool with image recognition for images and video. 

YouScan –  This Ukraine-based company offers social media listening and visual insights. The company’s client roster includes Samsung, Coca-Cola, and L’Oreal. The visual Insights module uses an AI engine for image recognition, allowing you to spot logos and brand-related photos that don’t appear in text-based searches.

How to choose the right brand reputation management solution for your business

Choosing the right software solution for corporate reputation management is an important choice that will shape a key part of your marketing tech stack. Here are some important things to consider: 

• Different disciplines of professionals should be part of the buying process, even if they aren’t the budget owner. The data generated by these tools is far too valuable to be siloed within one team. Bringing Marketing, Compliance, Legal, Product, and Sales together early can ensure you choose a platform that best benefits the broader organization. 
• Be mindful of duplication. Some solutions offer attractive peripheral features, such as web publishing integration. This might seem appealing, but if it duplicates technology used elsewhere in your organization, it may never get used. Keep a tight focus on the features you need for brand reputation management. 
• Ensure the tool can connect with all the right channels, including social media. Some solutions exclusively focus on review sites. If you’re accountable for how your brand is portrayed in social media, you don’t want to have any blind spots.

Monitor every mention of your brand with SentiOne Listen

Discover the who, when, and where about your brand, competitors, and trends with SentiOne Listen. This powerful social listening platform connects you with the opinions, questions and needs of your clients and prospects. Monitor brand mentions, conduct trend analysis, configure alerts, or gather insights from SentiOne Listen’s extensive reporting capabilities. To learn more, visit SentiOne.com or book a demo.