Announcing BrandsEye

by Rob Stokes

Followers of Quirk will have noticed that we’ve been harping on about Online Reputation Management for quite a while now. As some of you will know it’s because we’ve been beavering away building something for the last year or so. Something we’re pretty excited about.

Today, at last, we are able to reveal our creation to the world. I am very proud to announce the official launch of BrandsEye Online Reputation Management software. In a nutshell, BrandsEye allows you to understand and quantify your online reputation and gives you the information you need to make informed decisions regarding your brand online.
We’ve had a few of our fantastic clients using BrandsEye for almost a year now, which has allowed us to radically refine and improve the software. And now… it is ready for the world to see!

BrandsEye monitors the web for mentions of your brand, but it achieves so much more than your average Google Alert. Once it has picked up a mention, the tool allows you to tag the mention with a number of data points which are important to your brand such as the sentiment of the mention and credibility of the author. This data can then be mined for a wealth of valuable information which can be used to drive future internet marketing decisions.

One of the real innovations of BrandsEye, apart from its detailed reporting ability, is that it uses the data that you have attached to each mention to compute a reputation score for your brand. That’s right… 1 single number to represent the state of your online reputation at a given point in time.


How did we get to this number? Well, we did a whole lot of research on what variables impact a brand’s reputation online.
What is it about one mention over another that makes it more or less important to the state of your online reputation? We look at factors such as; age, link data, credibility, traffic volume and page prominence. This data is fed into an algorithm with different weightings of importance assigned to each variable. And out pops a number... the reputation score for your brand! This number can of course change by the hour depending on what is being said about you online.
The important thing about quantifying online reputation is that it enables you to benchmark. This means that you can compare your brand to your competitors’. I can, for example, tell you from a test we ran about a year ago during early testing, that as far as South African banks go, First National Bank had a pretty good online reputation and ABSA’s was nearing the toilet.

You can also benchmark against yourself whether this is in analysing past performance or trends or setting your reputation goals for the future. (We currently have a client sitting on a score of -2.13 where -5 is the worst and just over +1 is the average… they need to set goals and target negativity hotspots, BrandsEye will facilitate this).

The bottom line is that people trust what people just like them think (Edelman Trust Barometer 2008) and these people talk a great deal online. That’s why Online Reputation Management is so important.

Another feature of BrandsEye is that it combines the inimitable subjectivity of human intelligence and advanced statistical processing to ensure accuracy of data. Unfortunately despite mankind’s best efforts, machines are still far from perfect in being able to accurately gauge subjective elements such as sentiment and credibility. We recognised this and whilst we use software to do as much work as possible, the addition of the human element means the data BrandsEye provides is always spot on.

As far as cost goes, BrandsEye will be licensed at $750/month. We are aiming the product at mid tier companies who realise the vital importance of online reputation and need a software solution to help them manage and make the most of it.

On a final note, I would like to congratulate the Quirk team for making this dream a reality. In particular Andrew, Tim, Carlos, Isobel, Garrick, Kat, Will and of course Craig who spent many nights with his head wrapped up in the stats. This is a product of an immense amount of hard work and I’m incredibly proud of what we have achieved.

To find out more about BrandsEye, visit www.brandseye.com or get hold of Tim Shier to test it out – tim@brandseye.com.
You can also join our Facebook Fan Page to stay up-to-date with the latest news.

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