Blogs & Prospective Search Technology for Corporate Reputation Management
Posted by Administrator on September 21st, 2005
By Bob Wyman, PubSub | As I May Think…
Tracking the “blogosphere� is becoming more vital for businesses trying to control their brand and even predict relevant events to help build marketing strategy. Blogs and syndicated news feeds are highly popular and quickly growing as an information source. PR professionals need to stay on top of outlets to stay informed on the information that is circulating about their clients.
Traditionally, web searches have been retrospective in nature. That is, they search the past, often providing the user with tens of thousands of search “hits� based on historical data. This is an effective way to gather historical data, but how do companies stay on top of the latest trends and information impacting their clients?
Prospective search is emerging as a way of keeping up-to-date on any subject of interest. This technology constantly monitors relevant blogs and Web feeds for matches to users’ subscriptions and delivers results in real time. Thus, users are notified whenever something new appears on their subject of choice.
Specialized prospective search technology gives PR professionals the needed tools to catch newly-published content on blogs and other online sources to manage their client’s corporate reputation. Today, savvy PR professionals know the moment a topic of interest is mentioned anywhere across more than 14 million blogs. PR professionals and the media use media tools like prospective search for brand management and for legitimate insight into what is being said in the marketplace. Using broad keyword subscriptions to “listen in� on conversations happening across the blogosphere, PR professionals can be alerted to emerging trends and advise their clients on how best to take advantage of them.
This also gives them the advantage of getting in front of reporters as soon as word starts to spread on a particular issue. Getting ahead of a trend is the best way for PR agencies to control what is being said about a specific client or topic. For example, PR staff may receive an alert to a particular brand crisis as soon as it begins to appear in blogs and news feeds so they can proactively respond to any difficult situation. Likewise, tracking new media sources and gathering in-depth information on what’s being said before it hits mainstream media gives agencies a competitive advantage for getting their clients the best placement on a hot issue. This also proves useful for tracking press releases and news items about a client to understand their impact.
Here’s a real-world example: On Feb. 23, when chat about a potential deal between Yahoo and the online photo site Flikr.com first popped up on Gigaom.com, we flagged a pattern matching the two companies in blog discussions. The days that followed showed an ongoing conversation about the transaction, which was officially announced on March 20. This had a huge impact on the company and for investors alike!
This new realm of information access will prove invaluable to professionals in a wealth of markets.
About the author
Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub has been developing innovative, industry leading products for over 25 years. Prior to PubSub Mr. Wyman was instrumental in the creation of DEC’s ALL-IN-1, the first customizable and integrated office automation suite. ALL-IN-1 became the market leading OA product of the 80’s, earning as much as $2 billion per year in leveraged revenue. Also while at DEC Mr. Wyman was software licensing architect and was awarded some of the earliest patents in the field of Digital Rights Management. As Senior Product Manager for Applications Programmability at Microsoft, Mr. Wyman was responsible for OLE Automation, the first widely used and practical architecture for implementing reusable code components. Mr. Wyman has held senior engineering positions at Medio Multimedia, HealthGate Data Corporation, Marketwave, Accrue Software and firstRain.