"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently."

-- warren buffett

Before the age of social media, you and your firm’s reputation was crafted largely through word of mouth communication and print media. Those who wanted to get the word out about their work attended events, networked and pitched themselves to writers who were the gatekeepers to media. Building a reputation took time.

Fast forward to today. Google, social media platforms, online forums and other digital channels provide a vast array of digital real estate to contain things to be said about your firm and its work. Clients and other parties can sculpt an organization or firm’s reputation by providing comments, feedback and testimonials online. Building a reputation can happen faster than ever before. Unfortunately, damage to a reputation can also happen with record speed.

What is “reputation management”? 

Reputation management is the process of monitoring, influencing or managing your online search results to shape and influence how a person, organization or business is perceived online. You will often see it referred to as “online reputation management” or ORM. Offline reputation management is what is usually known as public relations. 

Reputation monitoring is one piece of the larger field of online reputation management. Reputation monitoring is knowing or listening to what’s being “said” about your firm online. 

Why monitor your firm’s reputation?

According to a Nielsen report, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family. After suggestions from friends and family, 88% of consumers trust online reviews (what is said about a company online) as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. Managing and maintaining that positive reputation is just good business.

Especially for firms whose market share is private sector or reputation driven, monitoring the conversation around the firm and its brand can be a strategy to improve the bottom line, increase the number of project inquiries and ultimately improve the number of commissions secured. 

Monitoring online mentions allows a firm to listen for negative feedback and respond quickly. It can also find positive mentions or a mention of a firm project or quote from a firm member. You can maximize the good coverage by sharing across your own media channels and even thanking the author blogger creating a connection for perhaps future mentions that the firm can acknowledge, 

What else to monitor?

In addition to tracking a company’s brand, there are other strategic items that are worth considering. Here are some other items to consider tracking:

1. Think beyond the brand name. Moving beyond firm name, consider any acronym, nickname or shortened form. You may want to track mentions related to key members of the firm or staff. Insider tip, if a partner’s name is pretty common, put the name in quotes and then add the term architect. That way it will pull items that have the name and architect mentioned somewhere. 
2. Track names important to the firm. This could include VIP clients or business development of future VIP clients. Consider adding their names or businesses. This can be a good way to stay informed of what is going on in your client’s world. Again this can work both ways allowing you to congratulate them, get market research about them or get an early inkling of market changes.
3. Follow inspiration. Monitor firms that inspire you. Notice what blogs and news outlets are covering them and reverse engineer the process if you want them to say the same about you. You can use alerts for your competitors or even your firm’s role models to stay abreast of what’s working, what’s not and what’s hot. Tony Robbins says “success leaves clues” and this is one tool to discover those tools so your firm can model the successes.
4. Watch keywords. Using your firm’s keywords is another way to get value. As said in number 1 above, make the effort niche this term or you will flood your daily inbox. For example “school design” may be too broad, but “net zero energy” “school design” could hit a sweet spot. Additionally, by setting up alerts around your firm’s keywords, you can monitor key conversations across the web where your firm might want to position itself as a thought leader in such conversations. 
5. Detect trends. By tracking key terms within our industry, you can watch for trends and changes. 
6. Discover new outlets for PR. By following your inspiration and watching keywords, you can discover which outlets, writers, and bloggers are covering your market.
7. Learn about new potential clients or projects. When keywords include a project type, you may discover announcements of future plans for new projects.  

How to Monitor Using Google Alerts 

It’s been around for ages, but many firms still don’t know about the power of using Google Alerts or forgot to harness it. 

Google Alerts is a free change detection and notification service. When you set up an alert, anytime Google’s magic bots detect one of your terms, it alerts you by email or RSS feed. While a Google Alert is not perfect, it is a valuable and free starting point.

How to set up a Google Alert:

• Log into a Google account. 

If you have access to more than one, strategically choose the one you use. For example, an alert to marketing@yourfirm won’t bother you when you get that big raise to ceo@yourfirm. But one sent to your personal business or personal non-business account will leave a void for the firm, or follow you.

• Go to Google.com/alerts.
• Enter the words, names, or brand you want to follow In the blue box at the top of the page. Below the box, Google will show you an “Alert preview” of the type of items that might be tracked with that word or phrase when you get the word or phrase you want.

TIP: Use operators to tweak search results to those most relevant to you. You can use a hyphen (-) before a word to exclude it from the search, a tilde (~) before a word to return synonyms or similar terms, or quotation marks (“) for an exact match. 

• Go to “Show options”. There you can edit
  • how often you want the alert sent,
  • what sources you want searched,
  • languages,
  • region, and
  • number of results
• Click “Create Alert”

Going beyond the basics.

Above, I shared Google Alerts as a free, basic way to monitor that will “push” the information to you. I said basic because Google Alerts is limited. It primarily tracks sources that Google indexes like web news and blogs. 

If you want to track social platforms as well, you will need to look at an additional service. Depending on your firm’s marketing budget you may want to look into a more robust platform. For an easy to follow spreadsheet that compares 19 monitoring services, see this chart by Alfred Lua from Buffer. Besides costs, pay special attention to the platforms supported. If you are going to pay for the monitoring make sure it’s covering the platforms that apply to your firm. 

Next steps.

If you don’t have any Google Alerts set up, go now and set up your first. Track mentions of your firm or even yourself.

Are you already using Google Alerts? Share with us how you use them in the comment box below!

Liz Harris, FSDA, is the Firm Administrator for Kevin Harris Architect in Baton Rouge, LA.

She is the Co-Chair of the SDA National Public Relations Committee for the 2020-2021 Term.