Manage Your Brand's E-reputation and Influence

In simple terms, an online reputation audit is a snapshot at a given moment of all the conversations taking place about your brand online.

You will analyze several elements, starting with your digital identity. This is the image you deliberately broadcast on the internet through your social media posts, blog/website articles, press releases, etc.

To structure your analysis, ask yourself the following questions: What, Who, When, and How.

What Does an Audit Contain?

Questions to ask yourself: What are the goals of my online communication? What tools does my brand use? What content is published? How often? With what result(s)? What are the means and resources (human and financial) allocated? 

This first part is fairly easy to do because you (normally) have the data at your disposal.

Now let’s move on to the part you haven’t yet mastered: user activity.

Questions to ask: How many times is my brand mentioned? On what platforms? What are the topics associated with my brand? What is the tone used? Who is generating this content? What impact do the things they say have? Could some of them become ambassadors for my brand? Is my brand positioning in line with my target? How did it react to my latest campaign? Etc.

This second part is a gold mine. This is an opportunity to learn more about what customers think of your products and identify new action levers (i.e.: a new product offering or an influencer prepared to collaborate.).

For the last part, you will broaden your horizons to take on the other players in the market.  

Collecting data on your company is a productive task, but it’s only partial if there’s no comparison data. So, you need to include competitor and sector analyses  in the audit.

Questions to ask yourself: Who are my main online competitors? What platforms are they present on? With what content? How often? What are the reactions from their community? Who are my main sector’s KOLs (key opinion leaders) or influencers online? How can I include them in my marketing communications? What are the new trends in my market?

You are not the only one who understands the need to invest in the web. Observe your competitors (direct or indirect), and especially their best practices.

On the market side, the more you know about what’s going on, the quicker you can react and adapt your offering. If you don’t, someone else will get there before you—that’s just how it is. 

Who Is in a Position to Conduct the Audit?

I have often heard that delegating your online reputation audit is better.

There are specialty online reputation agencies and PR agencies.

The advantage? They usually have access to social listening tools (such as Meltwater or Talkwalker - paid tools) and can conduct in-depth studies.

By “getting your hands dirty,” you will realize how much data is available and can define a scope of action and the indicators that interest you. Then you can brief the person who will conduct future audits. 😉

To deepen your research, you must collaborate with some of your service providers:  your web agency, press relations and influence agency, the people who manage your media buying, the company’s community manager, etc. You must first define what you expect from each of these collaborations.

When Should You Perform the Audit and How Often?

There are ideal times to start an audit. Here are some examples:

There is no right answer to how often you should do it; however, you should conduct an audit regularly.

You must define what will suit you best: a monthly, semi-annual, or annual audit.

A best practice is to carry out a new audit at least annually, potentially at the end of the financial year (to prepare for the new year).

How Will You Do This?

After all this information, an audit must seem enormous.

So, we’re going to go through the process, step by step, starting with defining your audit objectives and the scope of action that interests you.

Define the Scope and Objectives of Your Audit

The first step is to set a detailed framework for your online reputation audit. What is the context? What are you trying to determine?

What is your main objective?

• “I’m looking to establish a comprehensive inventory of my brand’s visibility.”

• “I’m looking at how my customers perceive my brand.”

• “I want to develop company awareness.”

• “I’ve just run an influencer campaign and would like to analyze the impact.”

• “I want to improve the SEO for my brand,” etc. 

Your objective will determine which platforms you audit.

List the Platforms That Are Most Important to You

Here is a list of some platforms you could include in your audit: 

• The most famous search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).

• Your website.

• Your blog.

•  Social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.).

•  Forums.

•  Review sites (TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Yelp, Google, Glassdoor, etc.).

•  Media sites (magazine press, regional press, national press, free press, etc.).

While it is interesting to have a global vision of all the platforms where your brand is mentioned, it is equally essential to identify the main channels your audit will focus on:

• Do you have a YouTube account that hasn’t had new content since 2014?

• Was your brand mentioned once on a blog but doesn’t show up in the search engines?

It’s better to spend time on platforms with real weight (or at least that you feel have potential).

Define Your Objectives and the KPIs to Be Monitored

Now let’s go into a little more detail.

You will list the related objectives and their performance indicators for each platform.

As you’ll see, there are plenty of indicators!

To avoid simply collecting statistical data, you’ll need to define what you are looking for by setting SMART goals.

To measure your brand awareness, you can: 

• Check the number of subscribers you have on each social network platform.

• Count the number of mentions from sources outside the company.

• Look at your site’s position on Google and its most important pages.

To know what your audience thinks of you, you will need to analyze:

• The number of reviews on your Facebook page.

• Google reviews or reviews left on specialty platforms.

• Comments.

In addition to the number, you will need to understand the sentiment (or emotion) of the reviews and comments. Apart from just the number, it will be a matter of understanding the sentiment (or emotion) of these reviews and comments. Are they mainly positive? Negative? What sort of vocabulary do they use? What is their tone? What questions come up most often?

Here is a summary table of possible quantitative and qualitative KPIs for each platform:

 The Deditex Case Study

To illustrate the various ideas you’ve learned about, let’s see how Michael, the new marketing director at Deditex, defined his two main objectives based on the various platforms and the KPIs to follow.

Let’s Recap!

• Before rushing in, you need to set the framework for your audit: 

  • What (What am I trying to find out?)

  • Who (Who will carry it out with whose help?) 

  • When (When and how often?) 

  • How (What goals and platforms will I focus on?)

• Then formulate the main objective of your audit: “Measure my brand awareness,” “Understand my customers’ expectations,” “Identify ambassadors,” etc. 

• For each platform, list the quantitative and qualitative KPIs you will track.  

Well done! Once you have done this groundwork, you are ready to dive into the data from your various platforms.