Wednesday, April 27, 2005
WebFountain: Tracking Online Reputation
One of the most difficult metrics to track online is a company’s reputation. For PR professionals the only tools so far have been image audits, market research and surveys.
When you create a corporate blog, you can test other metrics – hits, visits, clickthroughs, eyeballs – using easily available tracking software.
You can also track mentions of your company through PubSub and Technorati and conversations and trends through BlogPulse.
But how do you assess how your blog (or any other marketing effort) is affecting your company reputation?
Well, Big Blue has a solution to this called WebFountain and executives at the company call it “Google on Steroids.”
According to the company literature, WebFountain™ is a set of research technologies that collect, store and analyze massive amounts of unstructured and semi-structured text. It is built on an open, extensible platform that enables the discovery of trends, patterns and relationships from data.
A cover story in Spectrum Online notes that WebFountain is “not another search engine, but something beyond that — an analysis engine that can sniff out its own clues about a document’s meaning and then provide insight into what the search results mean in aggregate.”
Web Fountain was originally developed for a record company. An article in Forbes notes that:
The technology reads and understands text, and uses natural language to make correlations between words. Unlike traditional search, Web Fountain searches everything on the Web, including chat rooms, when set to that parameter.
In the case of the record company, Web Fountain was a two-week leading indicator of sales. "The buzz in the chat rooms for an upcoming CD indicated what was going to be a hot seller."
Another story in Computer world has an interesting discussion on reputation management:
Today, reputation management is increasingly the focus of new technologies and techniques, ranging from human-aided Web searches to advanced analytical software running on enormous server farms dedicated to teasing trends and shades of meaning from millions of Web pages.
As a matter of fact, reputation management has two current meanings. From the consumer's point of view, reputation management consists of those consumers who, on their own initiative, share their impressions of an organization or person.
Familiar examples include book reviews on Amazon.com or the comments that buyers and sellers post on eBay about one another's business practices. In short, consumers manage the reputations of those with whom they do business.
Companies on the receiving end of such scrutiny, however, view reputation management as the actions they need to take to ensure that they and their brands remain unsullied and viewed in the most positive light possible.
IBM will soon launch access to WebFountain’s capabilities through its partner Factiva.
The Spectrum article notes how a service that tracks the online reputation of companies could prove useful.
For example, once a week WebFountain could provide a report on gardening-related mailing lists and chat rooms. If a particular product is mentioned frequently, it might be worthwhile for a hardware chain to stock more units (or, if the buzz about a product is bad, to quietly retire it from the shelves).
In fact, it is detecting just this kind of buzz that will be the foundation of the first commercial test of WebFountain. Factiva believes companies have very good reason to care enough about their online reputation to pay for this service, which will cost between US $150 000 and $300 000 a year.
