Buzz metrics monitoring and reputation management

Sometime last Spring I fell in love with the term “buzz metrics monitoring”. As a developer at Resource, my role was to build, not to validate the effectiveness of our campaigns, but it was interesting to see how our work was being seen by others. Many of us haphazardly set up google alerts or monitored twitter for reference to our projects.

At Podcamp Ohio last June, the session by Bill Balderaz really helped me to see how buzz metrics monitoring could help in assessing the success of an online campaign. The key, of course, was knowing what to be monitoring for.

Many folks consider the motrinMoms mess of last weekend to be a two-sided failure: a failure to test the message before release, and a failure to monitor how it was received.

While I like to speak of “buzz metrics monitoring”, others gravitate towards the more serious-sounding “reputation management”. I realized that I wasn’t sure of how the two were related, so I asked the twitterverse: “buzzword alert: what’s ‘buzz metrics monitoring’ vs ‘reputation management’?”

Fortunately for me, last year at iCitizen I was introduced to Tom O’Brien of MotiveQuest, a “new kind of research company that uses online anthropology to explain consumer motivations”, and Tom was kind enough to help me understand things a bit more:

Tom’s response was enlightening, and helped remind me that they key to buzz metrics monitoring is that it is just metrics: you can gather all the data you want, but it is what you do with the data that makes it useful.

I had been thinking that buzz metrics monitoring was something you could farm out to a third-party to do, but reputation management had to be handled in-house. This was a naive view based on the assumption that the positioning of an organization would not be handled externally. I should have looked at the activities as practical vs strategic, and not made assumptions as to the nature of the parties that would be responsible for those levels of activities.

As a computer scientist, it is difficult for me to think of things outside of the scope of projects or campaigns, which may be another reason why I gravitate towards the more tangible “buzz metrics monitoring”. This is an activity that can take place for a given amount of time, and then may be considered complete. Reputation management is much more strategic and open-ended (and therefore potentially best handled by those who are skilled in the nuances thereof).

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