The need to protect your online reputation has once again become the center of attention after the US fast food giant Burger King had its Twitter account hacked. In the latest Whopper story (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) from the world of Twitter, the red, yellow, and blue of Burger King was replaced by the Golden Arches. Claims of ‘We just got sold to McDonalds!’ proved unfounded and, fortunately for Burger King, they seem to have emerged from the whole fiasco in a positive light.

Who would have thought being hacked would actually prove beneficial? Not many I’m sure – but that seems to be what has happened; Burger King has gained the kind of attention some advertising teams could only dream of. After all, tens of thousands of new Twitter followers in two days is hardly a disaster, nor is the worldwide news coverage that the story has created.

That said, Burger King were remarkably lucky. Contrary to popular belief, it would appear that people do in fact still have some sense of humor and took the tweets (which, let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t want my Grandma to read) as the outlandish attention grabbers they were always intended to be.
This inherent vulnerability of social media – in the sense that not only does it offer a way for consumers to get closer to the brand(s) that they love, but also has the power to alienate that very same fan base by something as simple as a badly worded tweet – highlights the need for online reputation management.
In this day and age, the brand is all-powerful. The likes of McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Apple, etc. have become so synonymous with everyday life that it’s almost impossible to go a day without seeing a billboard or television advert trying to sell you their latest product. Is it any wonder that major corporations spend millions on advertising campaigns? Not really, when they know a bad campaign could see them lose ground to competitors while a good one could bring in new consumers and lead to big profits. Given cases like Burger King’s, however, we are once again reminded that not all negative publicity is always bad, somewhat confirming the saying that any publicity is generally good publicity.

Since the days of Arkwright and Watt, mankind has come a long way. We’ve developed planes, trains, and automobiles (minus John Candy and Steve Martin, obviously). We’ve developed the telephone, the computer and the atomic bomb. These things, however, are being consigned to the annuls of history for one reason – the days of the tangible product are numbered.
The concept of ‘experience’ has become the key. What should the customer experience be like? Could we improve it? It is this focus on people rather than the product that is most intriguing. While you can easily measure something tangible – it is easy to count the number of laptops in a warehouse, for example – it is, however, much more difficult to measure emotions and feelings, especially the emotions and feelings of something as unpredictable as man.

The last three decades have seen a clear shift from the tangible to the intangible. Although it is true that the economies of western industrial nations are still 60-70% product focused, it is, likewise, true that almost exclusively new business start-ups are service based. Businesses are more concerned than ever with their online reputation – and rightly so. The blogosphere, alongside social media in general, has the power to make or break a company. One bad review that goes viral and your start-up that you have worked so hard to create is ruined before it has even begun! The answer? The beauty of online reputation monitoring and management.

In the information age, our online reputation becomes our most valuable asset. It takes years to build and seconds to ruin with all kinds of lies, distortions and rumors. Still less than 25% of businesses realize what is involved in keeping their online reputation safe and less than 3% have the available resources to invest in their online PR. What could be the solution?

Activities like media monitoring, reviews monitoring, sentiment analysis, and influence analysis are now automated and what’s more – Rankur gives businesses the possibility to stay focused on their production process and receive alerts only when there is something important to handle.

The following is a list of the most important issues that may affect your online status:

#3

Mentions with negative sentiment

There is no “undo” action on the Web. Every opinion published stays online and is being indexed almost immediately by search engines like Google and spread on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Your reaction time on negative reviews is vital for your business.

#2

Your name is mentioned by highly influential sources

It is time to check what is actually being said and who the author is. If the mention is negative – prepare a response immediately. The rule states that the only protection from negative opinions is the time of reaction. In case the mention is positive, prepare for the higher demand for your services.

#1

The number of mentions of your name goes irregularly high

This is a true sign that something important is happening on the net and social media. Your name is being discussed more than it usually does at that time,which means that your attention is needed ASAP: you are one click away from protecting your online reputation with automated alerts.

Rankur is a free tool for social media monitoring and online reputation management. It is mostly used by marketing agencies, business owners, and businesses in the hospitality industry. Rankur monitors their presence on the Web and social media including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ and more.

'Merkozy', as illustrated in a photo created by German newspaper, Bild

Merkozy – the moniker that symbolizes the marriage of convenience between the German chancellor and the French president became a popular expression. Rankur – a tool for social media analytics performed a research on the term’s popularity and the expressed sentiment by Internet users. The term is already used in internet search and increased its fame after the deal on December 5th.

The geographic location of the users who adopted the nickname shows that it is most popular in the UK and Spain.  It was introduced back in September, 2011 and gained popularity after a publication in The Telegraph. Currently it is gaining terrain after the EU summit from December 9 but unfortunately, as we’ll see below, the overall sentiment in the publications is negative.

Screenshot from Rankur.com

The demographic report illustrates the profile of the adopters and it is quite definite: an adolescent man in the age group of 19 to 32 years old. The finding is probably related to the men’s psychology – the testosterone gears up the will for negative attitude and usage of monikers.

The sentiment analysis report confirms the hypothesis of negative feelings.  Sentiment analysis from text is part of artificial intelligence studies and reports the author’s positivism in an automated and unbiased way.

Concerning our research term online users are very tough when using the sobriquet. 45.3 percent of the users express their thumbs down emotions, surely induced by the worsen Euro perspectives. Further exploration can be done in a few clicks by filtering the results by language, location, period and more. The results will be shared in future posts – stay tuned to our blog for follow up!

One more interesting thing to explore is the topic cloud – it gives the summary of what is being or has been discussed, together with a quantity indication and trends.

Important phrases used in comments and articles

That’s a short review of our research, obtained from Rankur.com. Thank you for reading our blog post.

Stay tuned to our blog and receive our tutorial on how to discover top influencers, opinion leaders, topic trends, sentiment analysis and more.

Having to decide how to promote your new product? Or what are the main features that people like on your competitors’ gadgets? Having issues with your current ad campaign? There are technologies that help you answer the question and ease the finding of the solution, but now they become free!

Consumers’ opinions have always been an important piece of information during the decision making process. Long before the Internet became so central in our lives people were asking their friends to recommend a product or service and their opinion was decisive factor. Nowadays millions of people share their opinions on social media sites or just by leaving a comment on an article or blog post. A recent survey states that 81% of the internet users have performed research on a product and 73% of the readers of online reviews confirm that the reviews had a significant influence in their purchase.

A new EU-based startup, called Rankur, combines technologies like Opinion Mining and Text Analytics into a cutting edge product that answers the questions “What other people think” and “What are other people talking about”. What is also important – their product is available for all types of businesses and marketing professionals.

By crawling millions of URLs per day and having a teacher-trained robot for text analysis their tool extracts opinions from web pages, tweets, blogs and news articles and performs deep linguistic analysis to summarize and consolidate data.

A marketing or PR professional may stay current to what is being said about a topic, find out what are the related discussions about, where do they come from, discover negative or positive text and filter opinions by language, source or trend. Understanding consumers’ preferences, attitude and behavior and being able to explore the demography behind is crucial for every marketing research.

Another application of these recent technologies is the automation of the follow-up of your brand reputation. Rankur helps you discover online brand abuse, false rumors or reputation attacks on time and helps you organize your actions.

The marketing adoption of text analytics techniques surges upward. The recent appearance of Apple’s Siri, the virtual agents from Virtuoz, similar initiatives from IBM and Google are proving the tendency that Artificial Intelligence will take part of our life and should be used for analysis of the increasing volumes of information and the support of our decisions. Rankur is taking part of this trend by sharing a free technology for online opinion monitoring and analysis.

Tweet

Define Goals and Objectives

Quite often the solution of a problem is hidden in its definition, so think well before hurrying to start the action. A good strategy for social media marketing is a must for an effective, measurable social media endeavour. To plan and execute effective marketing campaign is a big challenge, especially for smaller businesses.

An example of goals for social media campaigns are:

• Brand awareness
• Conversion ratio
• Inbound links
• Market development
• Increase the traffic

Before starting you should well define the timelines and the milestones for each goal of the campaign. And last but not least – choose a social media monitoring tool to measure the actual state of the business and then observe and analyse the outcomes of your efforts.

Research the Market

• Find your target audience

Find out where your customers share information, interact and make recommendations.

• Explore the target market trends

Stay tuned and contribute to the online community of your customers. Share news about tendencies and developments in their domain of competence.

• Discover the needs of your audience

Contribute to relevant discussions and find out what are the needs of your customers.

Campaign Foundation

The choice of tools for benchmarking the success and seeding your content on the various social media websites, the content creation and visual design are the corner stones in your implementation plan. Any changes to these elements would cost you a lot during the campaign.

Campaign Rollout

Follow these tips on during your marketing campaign on social media.

• Listen and assist

Social media platform is not about you, it’s about “them”. It is important to be a good listener and try to help others. Listen to your prospective customers and try to assist them by providing for example useful resources and knowledge. Do not talk about yourself, at least in the beginning. Your mission is to help others.

• Engage

Share other people’s posts. It is important to demonstrate that you value the others’ content. Provide authentic feedback to their work, talk, post and share content that provides value to your audience. Try to socialize just like in real life.

• Mention and #tag

Be proactive in conversations and assure yourself that your message will be heard by mentioning users in twitter using @ before the username.  Use popular tags in your messages so that your message appears in trendy searches.

• Effective retweets

While sharing interesting content make sure to not just retweet the message, but add the user’s name in front like RT @joe85 … Respectively while posting a message on twitter, leave enough space for comments and mentions after retweet. Knowing the limit of 140 characters it is wise to limit your message to 100-110 characters and let any future mentions and tags appear.

• Contribute

The authentic content has been and will always be the King in Social Media. Make sure you offer quality content which is engaging and interesting to your audience. The goal of your efforts should be the value creation. Once you start creating valuable content you’ll be amazed by the payback that Social Media Marketing offers to your niche.

Campaign management & support

Once your campaign is well planned and initiated, keep following your plan and it will pay off. Choose tools and methodologies for monitoring and measuring your campaign, analyse the results and take proactive actions to drive your efforts to a successful end.

Recently there is one more problem to solve with the brand management and this is the puzzle of online reputation and online monitoring.

Imagine a tool that lets you:

• Discover customers’ comments and complaints
• Measure and evaluate your online presence as well as your competitors’
• Perform effective market researches
• Mitigate negative content
• Support your online communities

With such a tool you will unmistakably see the insights of online discussions and define your marketing strategy.  You will also save time and money for online researches.

This tool is called Rankur and you can start using it in a minute with our free trial program or request a free, no engagement demonstration at info@rankur.com.

Clubs ordered by number of online reviews:

1. The Valmont club, London, with an average sentiment rating of 4.1 stars!
2. Rumi Bar, London, with an average rating of 4.0 stars!
3. The Peacock Bar, London, with an average rating of 3.3 stars.
4. Mahiki, London, with an average rating of 2.8 stars.
5. Tiger Tiger, London, with an average rating of 2.6 stars.
6. Oceana, Surrey, Surrey, with an average rating of 2.8 stars.
7. The Loft, London, with an average rating of 4.0 stars!
8. Metra Bar & Club, London, with an average rating of 3.0 stars.
9. Vendome Club, London, with an average rating of 2.7 stars.
10. funkybuddha, London, with an average rating of 2.6 stars.

Having a look at the figures it looks like the user rating is proportional to the online discussions (or ‘buzz’) and we may predict that The Loft will move up in the next months. Stay tuned to our blog or twitter account to get an update soon!

Here is an automatic summary of the most discussed features of these clubs. As you see, although there are a lot of complains, the fun and great time dominate their customers’ experience.

Our social media monitoring tool – rankur implements technologies for natural language processing, feature extraction and web crawling. It has put into practice algorithms for automatic sentiment recognition and opinion mining. Its statistics rely both on reviews that are explicitly marked from 0 to 5 stars by their authors and on automatically estimated sentiment in reviews.

Want to list the clubs in your city? Leave us a message or comment this page and we’ll post a research for your city or a particular club!

Sign-up demo:

and a demo for online opinion metrics and analysis:





You will learn how to set-up saved searches about any personal name, brand, local business or institution and see the trends about related topics. The estimation of their importance to the public is already an evident task. It is also fairly easy to drill-down to the source of any publication and register notes for any further actions.

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