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Today’s Article

The deeper information technologies penetrate our lives, the more powerfully you and your customers can use them for decision making. All we need to make the best available choice is reliable information – from eyewitnesses, first-hand users, reviewers, and experts. Search engines and news feeds give you a good idea if your brand is established and how it is perceived on the Web. But sites providing user-generated content – shared opinions in the form of ratings and votes, reviews and comments, tags and bookmarks – are even more important places for you to check brand reputation, and measure brand popularity.

What are the measurable signals of brand popularity?

Search for mentions of your brand name, create benchmarks, and run comparisons with your top competitors. Brand popularity metrics can be monitored at:

• Major search engines for both search volume (Google) and the number of found results.
• Blog search engines (Technorati, Google Blogs) for the overall number of blog posts, tags, comments, blog authority rates. There is no need to track all the blog search engines – select one or two with the results that you find most representative.
• Sites consisting of user submitted content (Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.) for votes and comments.
• Twitter for found search results, followers, retweets.
• Media sharing sites (YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo Video, Flickr, Deviantart, and many others) for the number of uploads and downloads, views or listenings, video/image/photo/music ratings, number of comments.
• Social bookmark sites and toolbars (Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and others) for tags and saved bookmarks.
• Product and service review sites if applicable (Epinions, Ratings, Buzzillions etc.) for the number of reviews, pro and con votes, ratings.
• Forums for the number of search results, threads, user reputation, connections.
• Social networks for engagement facts such as the number of connections, profile completeness, recommendations, participations in groups, Q&A, etc.

At the same time, brand reputation measurement should rest not only upon the numbers being quantitative characteristics of popularity, but also upon qualitative evidence. An analysis should also include the prevailing tone of the reviews, articles or comments.

How to automate the brand popularity analysis

The market has replied to a social media boom with numerous buzz and sentiment analysis tools. The most comprehensive solutions are quite costly. Nielsen’s Online Measurement, Sysomos’s MAP and Heartbeat and Radian6 are outstanding web buzz tracking and analysis solutions covering tens of millions of blogs, social networks, groups, boards and other CGM platforms, but a typical ‘do-it-yourself’ small business marketer could hardly afford them.

So if the perspective of paying a three- or even four-digit monthly fee is beyond your purse, a healthy approach would be to focus your analysis on a) the most popular (and crowded) social media and b) the most targeted (niche) sites while using free tools to check your brand reputation on them. The below free services will automate your brand reputation monitoring task rather efficiently.

• Major search engines – use the Web CEO Keywords tool to retrieve the search volume from Google and competition numbers from all the major search engines.
• Blog search engines – Nielsen BlogPulse is a great free service to see brand popularity trends. You can also use BlogScope for the same purpose.
• For Twitter info analysis, you can use TweetVolume.

Measuring positive and negative sentiments is still difficult to achieve via automated measuring services. Scoutlabs service (which is quite expensive) brings the best results in sentiment analysis and trend building. To our best knowledge, the current technologies for automated text meaning recognition are far from perfect. This is why, to guarantee the most accurate results, some expensive reputation management solutions offer manual sentiment measurement.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

Microsoft’s Bing has grown its number of queries from 5% to 8% of global searches. Little by little, Yahoo’s visitors are declining with 8% of all Internet searches compared to the previous year’s 9%. Google continues to dominate – it refers 81% of all searches.

Global Search Engines(%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

Search engines hold the first place as a principal site visitor referrer, and their share has significantly grown compared to February 2009. Bookmarking and linking, with shares fluctuating between 20% and 22% during the last year, refer an almost equal number of visitors. The number of search marketers who use paid advertising has increased.

Visitor Referrers (%)

SEO Experiment

Competition Number Comparison

This time we’ve queried the major search engines for approximately 1,000 popular and unpopular keywords and then grouped them by common themes. As a result, we’ve got the number of search results (competition) that each of the requested search engines returned.

A long time ago, search engines expressly boasted their search indice volumes. Now they don’t disclose this information, but we all want to have at least indirect evidence of how large the major search engines’ indices are. From the diagram, we can see that Yahoo! is a champ in serving search results (competitors) for popular and unpopular keywords. Google comes second and Bing comes third. But does Yahoo have a quality advantage? And is the Yahoo’s search index size larger because it has more unique sites in it? Or is it more likely that Google and Bing have more advanced technologies in dynamic page indexing and they are able to filter out dynamic URLs pointing at the same pages? A good point for a further research study, isn’t it?

SEO Experiment