SEM Wired

We should never underestimate powerpoint presentation, especially when it comes to explain stuff like marketing, branding, ROI, ROE, metrics and online marketing.

At eConsultancy they made available 10 high quality powerpoint presentations about social media and online marketing.

Pretty useful stuff, for instance when it comes to explain web 2.0 to internet-skeptic clients

15 years ago only very few companies had bought their own internet domain (most of the times with an awful looking page). At the times,  very few understood the importance of the internet would have gained in the coming future.

Nowdays everything has changed. The way companies market their products on the internet (and their own brands) has been heavily affected by the internet itself.

It’s not like tv  anymore: customers have the chance to express their opinions, hence markets slowly became conversations in between producers and consumers.

Given that, online reputation in social media and websites has gained an increased importance for companies.

Here’s a shortlist of the most useful online tools and application check your online reputation and make sure everybody is really satisfied with your product.

Beware of the bloggers

Compared to other internet platforms, blogs are the places which can sparkle really interesting and truthful conversations about products and their consumers from the consumers themselves.
It’s really easy to get involved (with comments for instance) and bloggers are not afraid to express harsh opinions or critics.

Hence the first place to go if you want to really know about your own reputation,  would be blog search engines:

• Google Blog Search
• Technorati
• Yahoo Blog Search
• Blog Search Engine

You might be also interested in blog comments. Here’s a more specific tool which keeps track of blog comments:

• Backtype

Please do not feed the trolls

Before blogs, before PHPBB, even before IRC chat there was only USENET.
It went into a steep decline in the past years due to the overcome of more mainstream internet communities, vertical portals, forums with fancy colors and no need of weird geeky clients to connect (one of the worst aspect of USENET usability) but USENET has been the very first place of discussion on the internet right after the rise of local BBSs.

While doing some research on this post, I bumped into a usenet message I wrote several years ago… it was still there. This is the downside of this service: messages are casted in stone.

Make sure to check this few websites. USENET works as a redundant system of servers: if you manage to delete a post on a local server owned by your ISP, you’ll need to delete from all the other servers in which the same message is stored in other to be 100% cleaned up…

• Big Boards

• Google Groups

The twitter era

In order to criticize someone you won’t need that many words. 140 are enough. Get your hands on the twitter search  and rummage for any clue that my lead to an unsatisfied client.

Twitter brought the internet back to its essential meaning (basic interface, great ease to use and an evergrowing community of users), and if you’re a twitter user yourself you know how easy is to get into any interesting discussion about any kind of product.

• Twitter Search
• Twitter Vision

Search social

Imagine to be able to rummage through Facebook, Mybloglog, LinkedIn, Typepad, WordPress, Blogger at the same time. Quite of a tool if you think in terms of reputation check, especially because these are focused on social networks.

• Samepoint
• Socialmention

Search for people, not keywords

This is more if you getting worried about your personal reputation rather than your company or your product’s.
It’s also useful if you’re looking for info about a prospect employee or a dodgy coworker…

• 123people
• ZoomInfo
• Yahoo People Search
• Peoplesearch

Anyway, the list of online apps you might want to use to check your reputation is endless. The web is a total ongoing permanent conversation, communities, chat, forums, social networks… conversations sparkle everyday, on every topic. It’s up to you to find the right niche and start searching.