What Is Reputation Monitoring, and How Does It Work?

Almost all businesses, big and small, local and international, have a presence online and specifically on social media. This means that there is potential for a lot of people online to have and share good and bad comments about businesses. Reputation monitoring is a process that continuously observes this sentiment, especially negative sentiment that could harm a  business’s digital reputation.

In a world where one negative comment or review can go viral overnight and severely harm a brand’s reputation almost instantaneously, proactive monitoring helps to catch and root out issues before they become a crisis. This allows a brand to expand its outreach with lesser risk and better outcomes.

What Is Sentiment Monitoring?

Sentiment monitoring analyzes not just what is being said, but also what it means, for you and your business. It helps to see whether your latest release is receiving positive or negative reactions in real-time, rather than waiting for survey responses and other, resource-heavy feedback methods.

As a result, businesses can easily and swiftly distinguish constructive reviews from detrimental ones. This leads to quicker, more effective solutions to problems, helping mitigate the sometimes catastrophic effect of negative sentiment. Brands and companies can monitor customer opinions and feedback, assess concerns, and address issues before they become damaging.

How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

Sentiment analysis uses advanced machine learning and language algorithms to analyze what is being said about a business or brand online. Sentiment monitoring learns how to categorize statements into positive, negative, or neutral. It then seeks words that correlate with example texts given for those categories.

For example; your business releases a new product, and you want to see if customers are happy, sad, or angry about it. A developer will set classifications for those terms, which will show up depending on the content of the comments gathered by the monitoring system. It is manually entered through lexicons and analyzed by the algorithm. How does the monitoring system understand customer comments? Natural Language Processing (NLP) translates the emotions or sentiment of feedback text, along with contextual content, into data and information the program can read, understand, and categorize.

How Does Monitoring Benefit Businesses and Brands?

1. Building Your Digital Reputation

The internet, and social media especially, is just an endless pool of people expressing themselves about anything and everything. Conversations come in waves, follow trends, and accumulate over time. Because of this, the chances of a comment or review about your business going viral are basically inevitable. Sometimes this is great, as when a customer gushes about how good your product or service is. But oftentimes it’s negative, as when a customer rants about a bad interaction or just lies about you for the sake of attention. But, just imagine any of these things happening without you even knowing it. Thousands and thousands either praising or hating you, all while you sit in the dark. Reputation monitoring and sentiment analysis keeps you part of every conversation. And it is useful in the future, to help you do damage control when necessary and remove any negative content before it is seen by millions. The less negative online sentiment about your brand, the less of it will show up in search results when potential customers look you up on Google, helping you maintain a positive online image.

2. Managing Online Reviews and Customer Feedback

To solve a problem, you need to understand the problem. Sentiment monitoring gives you data without having to task out a whole PR team for this. It allows you to quickly become aware of negative feedback, how severe and how ‘viral’ it is, and what can be done to address it. Your reactionary steps can range anywhere from a polite response to a negative, yet constructive review, all the way to considering legal action in the event of defamation. But you can’t solve a problem until you know of its existence. Additionally, sentiment analysis allows you to identify and amplify positive feedback, generate new content and get the word out when you do something good, which will benefit you in the form of new and loyal customers.

3. Exploring the Market

Effective decisions emerge from a thorough understanding of something, whether that is product design, hiring practices, customer service, or anything else. You have to understand your customer to give them what they want and need. One of the best ways to figure this out is through monitoring social media, where people will state, often quite bluntly, exactly how they feel and what they want. This is why reputation and sentiment monitoring is an absolute necessity: If someone tells you what they want, listen. Sentiment analysis allows you to predict more accurately where the market is trending, keep an eye on competitors, implement different strategies, and try new ideas. You can also identify and cultivate relationships with influencers in your market, allowing you to push further into your customer base.

4. Crisis Management

As stated, businesses now moves at a faster-than-fast pace. Online comments come at a tremendous speed. Keeping up with the feedback is impossible for any one person, or PR team. And this means risk, as a brand or company may miss a bad review or customer complaint that acts as the spark to a public relations crisis. Sentiment analysis can be your saving grace to avoid the reputation crisis that can damage or sink your brand. With constant monitoring and analysis, negative sentiment in comments and reviews can be quickly and effectively addressed, preventing negative content from going viral and harming your brand.

Overall, reputation and sentiment monitoring will allow you to better anticipate possible conflicts and crises, and underline the strengths your brand already has. Keeping constant tabs on your online reputation and identity will improve future decision-making, and enhance strategic thinking for your business, short- and long-term.

How Effective Is Reputation and Sentiment Monitoring?

Reputation monitoring and sentiment monitoring must go hand-in-hand with your PR and advertising strategies. The evidence is clear: 91% of people read online reviews. 84% of those readers trust those reviews. Most importantly (and frighteningly), 94% of them will avoid returning to a business with poor reviews. The reputation of your business directly impacts your bottom line, in terms of drawing in new customers, and keeping the ones you have loyal. A negative review can drive away the very people you are trying to court.

Why You Need to Hire a Reputation Management Firm?

Running any business is a complicated endeavor. Between caring for your customers, leading your employees, and building the right image of your brand with the public, it can be overwhelming. Blue Ocean Global Technology has the best tools to help.

Reputation monitoring and sentiment monitoring are designed to survey and analyze the emotions and perceptions of your customer base on an aggregate scale. A reputation management firm will examine what is being publicly said about your business everywhere possible; on social media, blogs, video, in print, etc., and then use that data to make conclusions about how it affects you. It looks deeply at how people feel, and what can be done to improve customer feedback for your business.

Reputation monitoring and sentiment analysis with Blue Ocean Global Technology can save your business from the dangers of online negativity, and bolster all the best things your company has to offer. Interested? Start with us today.