422. Online Reputation Management › how it works › step 2: measure – learn, understand, evolve stakeholders believe, understand how they arrived at that belief and evolve activities to improve the success of activities constantly. Whether a post is positive, negative or indifferent can be quickly assessed by reading it. Influence can be a little harder to establish. Indicators of influence, such as traffic, links and subscriber numbers, can all assist in assessing the influence of a blog. There are also services such as Blog Influence (www.bloginfluence.net) and Social Meter (www.socialmeter.com) which will show the audience and reach for an entered URL. There is also an increasing amount of specific social network influence tools available such as Klout (www.klout.com) or Twitalyzer (www.twitalyzer.com). However, all statements, particularly inflammatory ones, should still be monitored. Their influence may be low but sensationalised content often has a high impact. Influence can also assist in establishing the credibility of the author. Factors which can indicate credibility include the size of the blog’s audience, the frequency of posts, the age of the blog, and the quality and regularity of engagement (comments, likes, retweets etc). The source should also be looked at: is the mention a news item or a comment on a photo from a consumer’s holiday? To be able to monitor reputation over time, it can be a good idea to aggregate the information into a spreadsheet or database along with the factors mentioned above. Most ORM tools do, however, provide this functionality by default. It is necessary to determine what is important to the reputation of the company you are monitoring, and perhaps adapt factors accordingly. Your database might look something like this: Praise, URL of mention complaint, Source Credibility Influence Action neutral www.joesoapblog. Complaint Blog Very Widely read Post public com/ihatethisbrand post credible, comment well- acknowledging respected mistake and author. proposing rectification. www.ryanthewriter. Praise Video Not credible Blog recently Promote blog, wordpress.com blog or trusted, created, thank the user first blog unlikely to for praise, or post on have wide ignore the post. website. readership. Figure 17.3 A graph illustrating how a reputation crisis can impact your bottom line.426