I recently received an invitation to try the new Trackur tool for managing you reputation online.

Right on the front page, Trackur makes big claims about making reputation management easy for you.  

“You tell us the names, products, and brands that are vital to you and we’ll scour millions of blogs, news sites, images, and videos for you. If your reputation is being discussed, Trackur will alert you.”

Of course, with that description, I had to sign up. Trackur lets you try their product for 14 days for free (prices start at $88/month). That includes one saved search (so be careful what you choose), reports via e-mail and RSS, and updates every 12 hours.

Once logged in, a search form is displayed, with a keyword field and optional filters for inclusion or exclusion of keywords. There is an advanced option as well, letting you specify text only, video/images only or both.

Performing a search lists a number of blog posts where your keyword is mentioned. I tested searching for “Momondo” (the travel search engine), and got 21 results from blogs around the web. As I could save one search, I did so and could have opted for saving the results as RSS to my feed reader, or subscribe to updates via e-mail.

Then what?

Well, not much really. I’m not sure what the $88 per month are paying for, but I can certainly do it cheaper on my own. In fact, I can get better results for free. Searching on Google News and Google Blogsearch, I get 1 + 464 results (65 the past week). Since Google lets me subscribe to a News or Blog search through RSS for free, there is no reason for me to pay $88 (or a steep $388 for the Enterprise version with 15 searches) per month.

Conclusion

1. Stick with the free, unlimited features from Google or another free service if you want to subscribe to blogs and news where your company, brand or product has been mentioned.
2. For Trackur, try building a subscriber base on a Freemium model instead of charging for a tool that provides no added value.
3. If I would select a reputation management tool, it would include trend reports on the number of mentions per [day/week/month/other] and drill down from there. Providing an easy overview of your reputation adds value to a tool - there is too much information clutter out there to use one that simply lists all mentions of a keyword and lets dig down to figure out whether it was positive or negative.

Bottom line, keep doing it yourself or find a different reputation management tool.

Filed under: Social Media Marketing
Tags:Reputation Management, Reviews, Social Media, Tools