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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.