Tools for Managing Your Brand Online

Monitoring your magazine brand’s Web reputation can be just as important as updating your magazine’s Web page. Amanda MacArthur, Mequoda Group editor and publisher, offers three online tools that are necessary to monitor and manage her brand.

The rationale behind signing up for free alerts and networks? Constant conversation with your readership. “Sometimes people will link to the wrong page,” MacArthur says. “If we post a free special report, a blogger may link to our homepage instead of the report itself. We’ll be alerted through a social media tool and contact the blogger to remedy the situation.”

By constantly monitoring what readers and competitors are saying about them—and what they’re linking to—Mequoda has increased site traffic and newsletter sign-ups (which now boast a 28 percent conversion rate). Mequoda’s traffic has more than doubled from 12,000 unique visitors per month in March 2008 to 31,000 today. From one post on Twitter, Mequoda sees between 50 and 60 visitors. “Twitter is now our second biggest traffic driver after Google,” she says.

Tweet Later (www.tweetlater.com)
A “Twitter Productivity Tool,” this free function tracks keywords and can be set up to automatically e-mail a daily digest of all of a brand’s daily mentions on Twitter. The service costs $29.97 per month.
 
BackType (www.backtype.com)
BackType tracks what’s being said about content across the Web using BackType Connect, which supports every major publishing platform for blogs, as well as Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed and Reddit. Publishers work with BackType to display related conversations online with existing comments on their properties to encourage more engagement.

SocialMention (socialmention.com)
SocialMention’s search platform tracks conversations across the Web in real time. It offers a free, adhoc search engine that provides tracking and metrics with support for more than 75 social media properties and is available in multiple formats.

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