25. March 2008
Brand owners have always found ways of tracking public opinion. Back in the pre-digital days, polls, surveys and focus groups were the best way to gauge the public mood, while the birth of the internet added website hits, page views, clicks and impressions to the measurement pot.
The difference in a web 2.0 world is that brands can understand what customers do, say and think in real time. Social networking sites, blogs, wikis and forums enable users and consumers to get together to praise – or criticise – a brand at their convenience. It goes without saying that brands need to be aware of how to deal with these developments both for reputation management and as a way of measuring marketing effectiveness.
But with so much chatter going on, how can you find out how your brand is perceived online? Google Trends is a good place to start, and allows anyone, for free, to look at search trends on Google. It shows the frequency with which your brand has been queried on the search engine or referenced in Google News within a given timeframe.
It’s the perfect channel for tracking buzz around new product campaigns – at CMW, we’ve been using it to follow the progress of our client’s new car launches. This is a really good way to use Google Trends as it effectively shows the cumulative effect of all the channels being used by the brand. It’s incredibly detailed and even correlates search frequency peaks with relevant news items. The service also allows users to compare their trends with those of competitors or other brands.
It’s also important to keep track of what’s being said about your brand in the blogosphere – and how often. Various sites allow you to do this, with Google Blog Search one of the best known.
Another useful site is Blog Pulse, which works almost as a combination of Google Trends and Google Blog Search. It allows you to search blogs worldwide to find how often your brand has been mentioned. You can even create graphs of trends over several months and compare up to three search terms to see how your brand measures up to the competition.
The one thing that these sites can’t do is tell you how much of the chatter is positive, and how much is negative. But that’s where Opinmind can help – the site trawls through various blogs and compares positive vs. negative mentions!
Of course, blogs and Google are not the only places where users and consumers get together to discuss brands. Tweet Volume is a great way to measure how many times (if at all) your brand is being mentioned on Twitter and allows you to compare your brand ‘noise’ with competitors. A search on photo-sharing site Flickr will reveal how often your users have tagged their photographs with your brand name.
While these alternative measures are fun ways of tracking your brand’s online visibility, brands of course still need to continue to track metrics around their website. Most site owners now have regular reports from their hosting company on page hits, unique visitors to the site, new visitors etc, but Alexa enables you to aggregate some of these into one place. Alexa also lets you compare your information with up to five other sites and look at stats across a period of up to five years (where data is available). You can even and copy the resulting trends graph onto your own brand site, if you want to.
In the end, however, while there are a number of ways that brand owners can track internet chatter, none of them are fool-proof. For some of the measures (such as Tweet Volume), your brand needs to generate enough of a ‘buzz’ to be picked up at all. It is also important to note that since the net is a worldwide entity, any ‘chatter’, whatever the channel, may not necessarily be UK-based.
It’s important to remember that most of these measures merely demonstrate the volume of internet buzz, and not the content or tone of any coverage, negative or positive. Nonetheless, they all certainly worth bearing in mind and, as with everything else online, as they add more features and iron out teething problems, will become indispensible marketing tools. A savvy marketer should get to grips with this new measurement world sooner rather than later.