Managing Reputation Alerts using BOOST
One of the best new features of the new Online Safety BOOST is Reputation Alerts. We have worked hard to integrate this service directly into BOOST to give you an intuitive tool that works well and looks great!
In this article I will be taking you through the features of the Reputation Alerts tool, and give you some insight into how best to set it up to make sure you get good quality results.
What is it?
Reputation Alerts is a tool that enables you to enter search keywords and phrases, which will then monitor the World Wide Web for content that matches. This is very useful for seeing who and what is being talked about regarding your organisation or staff on the Internet.
As well as displaying results in the dashboard, the tool will also alert you by email of any high influence posts it finds on the Web, as it finds them.
The Reputation Alerts dashboard can be accessed in BOOST by clicking on Tools> Reputation Alerts.
Adding an Alert
When you first arrive at the BOOST panel, you will have no Alerts setup, so click the Create an Alertbutton to create your first alert.
You are now presented with the Create Alert dialogue where you can enter the details of the content you would like to capture from the Web. It is critical to get the setup of your keyword correct to make sure you don’t get either lots of irrelevant matches, or miss matches that are relevant.
Keyword/Phrase
Enter a keyword or phrase to match, for your first alert you should probably enter the name of your organisation, e.g. “South West Grid”. This will match that phrase in the order specified, so it will not match “Grid South West” or “South West of the Grid”.
If your organisation name can be represented in a number of different ways, you can setup alerts for each variation, e.g. “South West Grid” and “SWGfL”.
Phrases to Include
In this control you can enter a list of keywords or phrases that should also be present in the matched content.
Multiple keyword/phrase matches can be delimited by a line break, comma, or semi-colon.
Phrases to Exclude
The same as Phrases to Include, but will return matches where the content does not contain the specified phrase(s).
Sources
If you want to limit an alert to certain sources such as Twitter or Facebook, select the sources you would like to filter by here.
Tips for Setting up Good Alerts
How the phrases/keywords are matched in the results
Phrase matching is not case sensitive, and will only match full words, so for example if you want notification of any Twitter messages that include your Twitter handle, you will have to create an alert with the full handle. For example, our Twitter handle is @SWGfL_Official, the phrase/keyword “SWGfL” would not match results with our handle in it, we would have to setup the keyword exactly: “@SWGfL_Official”.
Don’t be too broad
To avoid irrelevant matches, the search text you enter into the Phrase/Keyword should not be too broad, you can refine your results further by include some other phrases in the Phrases to Include control.
It should be noted that the main phrase entered should still not be too broad, even if including other phrases, as initially all the results are brought in from this before being filtered by the included phrases. If there are too many results found for the initial match, the system will be unable to spider all the initial matches and relevant results may be lost.
Use Included Phrases to match content where the phrases may not be together
Your organisation may be called St Mary’s Primary School and be in Exeter, to match content in your alert, you could enter “St Mary’s Primary School Exeter” into the Keyword/Phrase control, but this will not match any content where the phrase is not in that specific order, for example an article might write “. . . first prize went to St Mary’s Primary School in Exeter . . .”, which would not be matched.
We can solve this by entering the keywords separately into the Phrases to Include control. A better setup here would be to enter “St Mary’s Primary School” into the Keyword/Phrase control and “Exeter” into the Phrases to Include control.
Setup Alerts for Each Variation
If you are unsure of whether an alert you have setup will capture everything about your organisation, setup separate alerts for each variation, .e.g. “St Mary’s Exeter”, “St Mary’s School Exeter”, “St Mary’s Primary School Exeter”.
Monitor your Alert Performance
Keep an eye on the matches you are getting back, and tweak your search parameters to cancel our irrelevant matches, or to include ones that are not getting captured.
The Dashboard
Once you have added an alert, you should start seeing results arrive within an hour or two. The dashboard shows you your alert performance over the past month, the chart tracks the number of posts, average sentiment, and average influence over that time.
Underneath is a table that shows how each individual alert has performed over the last month, with a comparison to the last week showing you the percentage change compared to the previous 3 weeks.
Posts
The number of items of content that have been matched to the alert(s).
Sentiment
Based on the words in the matched content, a sentiment value is generated to represent the mood of the matched content. Generally the range of the generated sentiment value is between -1 and 1. It can be taken that anything with -0.5 or lower is negative and anything 0.5 or higher is positive.
Influence
This value gives an indication of how influential the website or author (For social networks) is, the range is between 0% and 100%.
Managing Results
To view the results that have been found for your keyword on the internet, click it in the alerts list. You will then be presented with all the results from the last month along with a chart mapping posts, sentiment, and influence.
Viewing Results
To view a result in the list, click on it and the original URL will be loaded in a new window.
Archiving Results
If you want to track which results you have dealt with, you can select the result your wish to mark using the checkbox to the left hand side of the result, and select the archive button above the list. You can also select multiple results and archive them all at once.
Searching Results
You can search through the displayed results using the search box on the right above the results. For a more advanced search, click the advanced search icon where you can refine your search further.
To change the date range of the displayed results, enter the desired dates into the From and To controls. You can use most date formats in here, for example:
- 30/09/2015
- 2015-09-30
- 30th September 2015
- 1 month ago
You can also refine by Sentiment, Influence, and Source by selecting a refinement from the drop-down menus. To show archived results, change Show to Only Archived Results.
By default, you will be shown only new results from the past month.
Alert Emails
A great feature of reputation alerts is that it will email you when it finds high influence positive or negative content. This enables you to react to the latest content as it is found.
You will also receive a monthly digest, showing you your top positive and negative results for the past month, along with a chart tracking your Alert performance.
Changing your Alert Settings
You can change your alert settings by navigating to Account > My Account. From here you can select whether you want to receive positive and negative flash alerts, set the influence threshold at which those alerts are sent, and select how often you would like to receive the email digest.