Andy Beal - Reputation Management Trackur

There are 3 of us (myself, Andy Beal and Lee Odden), who truly get the "power" we have.. and yet we choose to shout until our voices are hoarse about ORM. I took a moment or rather Andy took a moment out of his busy schedule to answer some quick ORM questions:

@steveplunkett: You have listed yourself as a "reputation management consultant", why do people need one?

That's a great question. When I give seminars on the topic of online reputation management, I often ask the audience how many of them don't believe they have an online reputation. If anyone dares to raise their hand, I threaten to go and write a negative blog post about them, to prove they have one!

And that's the message. We may not all have a recognizable brand, but we do all have an online reputation--and you could argue that the lack of a reputation, could be just as damaging as one that's tarnished.

Whether you're applying for a job, seeking venture capital, looking for a date, or trying to win your one thousandth customer, you can bet that someone, somewhere is Googling you, or asking their social network what they think about you.

I help individuals and companies to present themselves online in the best possible light.

@steveplunkett: ORM stands for Online Reputation Management, if you were to define that term, what would it be?

When I wrote Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online no one had come up with a definition for online reputation management, so I created one. Two years later, I believe it stands up well:

Online reputation management ~ realizing that the perceived value of your brand is defined by information found and discussed on the internet; therefore requiring your constant monitoring and participation in these web conversations

@steveplunkett: How did you come up with Trackur?

Once my book was published, I realized that we didn't find many online reputation monitoring tools that were a natural step-up for someone that had outgrown Google Alerts. You went from free to thousands of dollars a month. I wanted to fill that void and I wanted to create a tool that could be set up in just a matter of minutes. One month later, I publicly launched Trackur, and today it provides reputation monitoring for just $18 a month, with a learning curve of just 60-seconds!

In fact we have video that shows just how quickly Trackur can be set-up: http://www.trackur.com/challenge.php

@steveplunkett: What advantages does Trackur have over using something like Google Alerts?

Well, we bring all of your keyword monitoring into a dashboard that makes it easy to set-up and manage. We cover more sources than Google Alerts does and we also provide influence measurement tools so you know not just who is writing about your brand, but how likely they are to influence your online reputation.

We also offer some pretty cool tools for marketing and PR agencies that want to provide online reputation monitoring services to their clients.