IT ADVISER

Accessible tools to safeguard your online reputation

Multiple free and inexpensive programs can help you monitor the buzz on social media.

By Joe Dysart

Joe Dysart (www.joedysart.com) is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan. His email is joe@joedysart.com.

Ophthalmologists are increasingly struggling with an uncomfortable truth of the online world: If you’re not talking about your practice on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networks, other people are.

The solution: Social media listening tools — both free and premium — that ophthalmologists can use to track their brand online and protect it. In addition, experts say once you get your listening skills in order, you should establish a social media policy if any employees post online on behalf of your practice.

ONLINE MONITORING TOOLS

Here are three tools for monitoring these respective services:

A Facebook employee contemplates Facebook’s next move.

• Google. Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) enables you to monitor anything that shows up in Google search engine returns that mention your practice’s name. It’s free and easy to use. You may also want to set up separate alerts for your own name, and the names of key physicians and staff in your practice.

• Blogs. For blog monitoring, Blog Squirrel continuously monitors postings on 75 million-plus blogs and delivers daily reports of new mentions of a company name, brands and issues. Pricing varies. A 14-day free trial is available.

• Facebook. Not surprisingly, Facebook has its own tool for helping you monitor what’s going on with your page on its service, known as Facebook Insights (www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=insights). Among other things, Insights can track how people are discovering and responding to your posts on your Facebook page.

TOOLS FOR TWITTER

For Twitter, a host of monitoring tools are available. The free TweetLevel (http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/) combs the “twitterverse” for mentions there. Tweet Effect (www.tweeteffect.com) helps you spot which of your tweets were home-runs, by highlighting those posts that generated more followers, as well as others that prompted people to stop following you. Twitter Grader (www.twittergrader.com) and TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com) offers similar, free monitoring analytics.

Twitalyzer (www.twitalyzer.com/), is an analytics service that evaluates the impact your practice is making in the Twitter world against 50 metrics, including overall influence, brand credibility, and the speed at which tweets about your practice travel. Pricing for businesses is $99 a month.

Other analytics tools for Twitter include Klout (http://klout.com/home), Kred (http://kred.com), and Twitter Counter (http://twittercounter.com/pages/100).

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORS

If you’re both monitoring and participating in social media, HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) is a comprehensive tool that allows a practice to manage its social media identities on an unlimited number of social networks and track what’s being said across all significant social networks. Pricing starts a $9.99 a month.

Meanwhile, larger practices may want to take advantage of more sophisticated social media listening tools. These solutions go beyond simple tracking of key words and phrases. Instead, they track what’s being said about you on social media using natural language analysis. This method offers subscribers insight into the deeper meaning of posts and interactions on the social Web — rather than just basic glimpses at sentences that contain certain keywords. According to Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with market research firm Forrester (www.forrester.com), highly rated solutions at this level include:

• Crimson Hexagon (www.crimsonhexagon.com/).

• evolve24 (www.evolve24.com/).

• NetBase (www.netbase.com/).

Other higher end social media monitoring tools include:

• Dow Jones Insight (www.dowjones.com/factiva-communicator/insight.asp).

• Nielsen (http://nielsen.com/us/en/measurement/online-measurement.html).

• Alterian (www.alterian.com/).

• Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com/).

• MutualMind (www.mutualmind.com/).

• Converseon (converseon.com/).

SPIKE THE SOCIAL MEDIA PUNCH

While you’re listening, you may also want to spike the punch. Instead of cowering about a single negative post that could sink your practice, you can populate your Web site, blog and social media presence with positive comments about your practice with online testimonials. “Social media is changing the way companies learn from and understand their consumers,” says Patricia Gottesman, Crimson Hexagon’s CEO.

Essentially, service providers in this space solicit positive, written feedback from your most satisfied customers and ensure those accolades show up on your Web site, blog and across social media. Genuosity (www.kudosworks.com) offers such services, as does Zuberance (www.zuberance.com).

“Blogs, discussion boards and other forms of interactive media are the most cost-effective customer feedback mechanism ever invented,” says Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media. “You won’t get a representative sampling of your customers, but you will get your most passionate customers.”

DEVELOP A SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

Once you’ve put your listening and positive feedback tools together, it’s imperative that your practice also develop a social media policy if any or all of your employees are posting on social networks on behalf of the practice, according to Janet Fouts, author of The Social Media Coach (http://janetfouts.com/).

One caveat: Be sure the policy reads more like a friendly guide than a stern warning, Ms. Fouts says. Otherwise, you’ll likely kill the very spirit behind social media. Essentially, don’t “write a huge document that strangles any hint of spontaneity from your team,” Ms. Fouts adds. Among key points she suggests a social media policy address are:

• Let it go. Once you agree to play in the social media space, realize you’re simultaneously agreeing to lose at least some control over your practice’s image. Given all the interactivity on the social networks, as well as the tens of thousands of cacophonous voices, it’s inevitable. Accept the ground rules, social media experts say, and instead focus on the medium’s benefits.

• Lose the filter. If you plan to run every post for Twitter or Facebook by your attorneys, save yourself the trouble and don’t do social media at all. “Social media doesn’t work like this,” Ms. Fouts says. “If your statements appear to be canned or professionally produced, it’s bound to fall flat.” OM