Managing Reputation Online - a Pipe Dream?

As Benjamin Franklin said: "It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it". Reputation is becoming ever more difficult to protect in the online world, especially if you don’t know you’re losing it. And, as Jeff Jarvis describes in his excellent book ‘What would Google do’, Dell paid a heavy price for ignoring what was going on in blogs where dissatisfaction eventually started to erode the company’s share price.

Reputation is equally important to public sector organisations and can no longer simply be measured through press clippings. Many people already use online tools like Google Alerts to keep track of news items, and Technorati, Social Mention and Twitter Search are all great ways to hook into the zeitgeist.

But what if you wanted to create a dashboard-style tool that is constantly scanning the online world for the buzz around what you’re doing? Two possible answers might be Netvibes and Yahoo Pipes.

Netvibes is a bit like iGoogle. It allows you to create a personalised homepage made up of ‘widgets’: small modules of data from 3rd party sources. Some widgets are already built for you like BBC News. You can create others from scratch. For instance, you can get Twitter to provide a live update of all activity around a particular search term that you’re interested in, and present the results in a constantly updated box on your page. You can pull together as many dashboards as you need that combine feeds from news sources, blog searches and social networks, filtered on the issues that you are particularly interested in. Cabinet Office have built a good example of a Netvibes dashboard to track coverage around their recently published policy on the use of open source software.

Not for the faint-hearted, Yahoo Pipes is a mashup tool that, as its name suggests, allows non-techies to build online plumbing that delivers sophisticated customised news feeds and web pages from a range of information sources. With numerous examples to play with, Pipes lets you aggregate, filter, map and do all manner of other clever stuff using pretty much any data that’s available online. It turns the results of your efforts into web content that you can bolt into your existing sites or create as a module for an iGoogle customised homepage.

Image courtesy of evisibility@Flickr