Tracking your mentions

Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

StartPR was born of the desire to find a better way to track the online conversations that are occurring about the companies, products, and individuals that are important to you.

Whether it’s for your own company or for your clients, we know you need to stay on top of what’s being said online. You have to know about the positive mentions and about the negative ones. Did someone have a problem and is venting online? Who had a marvellous experience? Are there suggestions to improve the product or service? Has a blogger found a new use for the product, or find a flaw in the design? Are people liking or disliking your competitors’ offers?

With the advent of social media platforms and networks, the conversations about these questions have ben amplified. Since people are now expressing their positive and negative experiences online, their individual voices get heard, commented on, and passed on by many more people than ever before. In some cases, these conversations spread very quickly to thousands of people. And, if you are unaware of it, it can feel like standing in the middle of a thunderstorm without an umbrella. You will get wet, and it will take time for the storm to pass and for you to dry off.

What we noticed

Previously, we had been using various tools and alert systems to track online mentions of the brands, companies, and products we were working with. As time permitted, we would respond to certain blog posts, we would ask our team mates to address others, and sometimes we would ignore posts, deliberately or not.

The trouble was, we would miss some of the mentions. We would also lose track of the ones we responded to, over time. It was tedious to report on our blogger relations activity to our team and clients, unless we set up an Excel spreadsheet. We had no way to easily manage and delegate the conversations to our colleagues, other than shooting them an email or instant message. We also had no way of storing or exporting the mentions for later use. Did we read a mention that required no action? There was no way to record our notes for our colleagues to see.

Out of this need, we developed StartPR

We wanted to make it as simple as possible to:

Track mentions on social networks and on over 100 million blogs worldwide;
Track our collective blogger relations activity;
Annotate and store the most important mentions;
Collaborate with and coordinate responses with our colleagues;
Create reports detailing the online mentions and our respective activity.

We’re launching very soon and we hope you’ll give our service a try and let us know what you like and don’t like about it. Just sign up at www.startpr.com and then drop me an email at alex [at] startpr [dot] com and we’ll hook you up!

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