Just Dropped In To Check What Reputation My Reputation Was In….

This is from now on the problems brands are facing today.

With 20% of Tweets mentioning some kind of brand or mark, dozens of millions of fans benefiting from the advertising on Facebook, forums and e-commerce sites becoming more and more widespread for hundreds of thousands of Internet users, and with over 40,000 new blogs created daily and millions of emails in circulation, the problem is immense!

Word of mouth has changed its form.

The Internet and, particularly, social media has transformed conversations once limited to the classroom, the coffee machine at work, or mothers, into millions of simultaneous discussions that become more and more interconnected.

How can brands catch on?  According to The BIA Kelsey Group, a consulting firm, the expenditure of ERPM (Email, Reputation and Presence Management) will reach $3.1 million by 2013.

Word of mouth is the Holy Grail when it comes to marketing strategies.  A rainbow of media tactics on the Internet offer a key to the world, but until that point, there is word of mouth.

Managing the reputation of a brand on the Internet has generated a demand for technological business, professions, and solutions, a little like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and has become a major business for brand marketing. 

Among the existing solutions, to quote BrandsEye that states to be the only tool…..

However, if BrandsEye boasts a series of impressionable functions, enabling to:

1. listen to the "global discussion" about the brand
2. offer the possibility to enter into the conversation
3. react as fast as possible if ever a "crisis" came about
4. create quantified relationships with up and coming trends
5. monitor the competition

It is to a great extent defensive ORM (Online Reputation Management) and tools for crisis management.

True, a large number of brands fear a blow to their reputation on the Internet.

The result is a cautious approach to word of mouth on the Internet.  Hundreds of millions of discussions about brands develop and form a global conversation which is very quickly becoming the key to a successful e-commerce experience.

Is this conversation destined to stay out of hearing distance form marketing managers?

Matt Booth, (senior vice president and program director), à BIA/Kelsey adds,

"There are too many disparate conversations going on through social networks, user reviews, message boards and online affinity groups for a small business to find let alone track manually......The market has developed in such a way that ERPM (Email, Reputation and Presence Management) is basically a white space that capital and technology will rush to fill."

This requires a lot of skill!
How does one speak when there are so many word of mouth flows?

This is the question that opens access to $3.1 billion by 2013!