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It's well established that other media drive consumers to search and there is a growing body of research that shows search results have an effect on brand perception. This is, of course, a double-edged sword: it can help a brand when search results are positive, and hurt if the results are negative. What is a brand to do? I'll be discussing the reputation challenges marketers face online and some search-based solutions they can adopt to protect their brand at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago on December 11th. Please stop by and participate if you happen to be in the windy city next month.

A couple of months ago, the battery on my relatively new laptop died. The manufacturer promptly sent me a replacement and asked only that I return the defective battery equally promptly. No big deal, right? As things turned out, it was a big deal, requiring multiple phone calls over the course of several days - just to find a customer service agent who knew the address where to send the dead battery.

I twittered about my frustration (and amazement) that customer service didn't seem to know its own address, at one point comparing my experience with that of Dell owners in the pre-Jeff Jarvis days. Almost immediately, I got a tweet back from @RichardatDELL, who monitors the social media space for mentions of Dell. His response was an ironic "thanks for bringing up the bad old days" note, even though clearly my frustration had to do with a competitor, not Dell itself. We exchanged another round of light-hearted tweets and that was the end of it.

My interaction with Dell brings up some vital issues about the blurring lines between social media monitoring, management and marketing. The value inherent in monitoring online social spaces is hard to overlook. Not only does it provide an early-warning system against possible brand threats but it also can provide a wellspring of valuable information about where consumers' interests lie and what products or features they'd like to see from a favorite brand.

To keep an eye on online conversations, Dell uses Visible Technologies' TruCast monitoring platform, one of the many I recently evaluated. It has an impressive-looking user interface and a very useful mechanism for responding to and tracking subsequent interactions with individual bloggers (although it does not yet permit direct replies on Twitter). No doubt TruCast and/or one of the free Twitter-specific scanning tools like Tweet Scan helped alert @RichardatDELL that I was talking about Dell.

Online monitoring is just the first stage. Online brand management takes the game to a different level with a number of facets. On one hand, content creation and optimization or even the strategic use of paid media can help to mitigate negative results or promote positive news. On the other, brand management requires people skilled at outreach and interaction with online communities, each of which has a distinct constituency, rules and modes of expression.

At this more personal level, the line between social media monitoring/management and social media marketing can start to blur. In my interaction with @RichardatDELL, I had clearly expressed dissatisfaction with my laptop, which was made by a Dell competitor, and our back-and-forth conversation could have opened the door to a marketing opportunity. However, while social media seem to be ideal for the kind of one-to-one marketing that brands dream about, they aren't always well suited for it. More specifically, it's hard to know when or even if to inject marketing into the "conversation." 

In my specific example, an offer from Dell presented over Twitter would have been a turn-off since I regarded our conversation as precisely that, but that's just me. Someone else in my situation might have felt or reacted differently. This is where the challenge lies, and marketers and consumers are still feeling their way without much in the way of roadmap.

All of this leads me to wonder whether I'll be hearing from @RichardatDELL again soon....

The field of reputation monitoring services is large and growing, so how can you go about getting a handle on who the players are? Good starting points are Forrester Research's 2006 Brand Monitoring Wave report and Forrester's more recently updated (and also more extensive) Brand Monitoring Vendor Product Catalog (if you don't have a Forrester subscription, you'll have to pay to see the Wave report, but access to the VPC is free if you register for a guest account). Appropriately for this particular sector, the value of word-of-mouth is not to be overlooked. Suggestions from colleagues, friends around the industry and people I encountered at conferences all played an important role in helping to narrow my consideration set.

I will be getting into specifics about the different services in an upcoming series of blog posts, but suffice to say that taking a close look at so many different takes on a similar challenge has been illuminating. The range and type of offerings is extremely varied, from the relatively bare bones self-service dashboard to the value-added agency model. One takeaway for me was that as the lines between digital media increasingly blur, it becomes more difficult to discern where one type of agency's "natural" area of expertise ends and another's begins. Search and reputation monitoring (and management, for those monitoring firms that offer it) have grown inextricably linked, which makes agency self-characterizations interesting, to say the least.