Analyze

You’ve been monitoring what the online world has been saying about your product and now you want to analyze everything. Maybe you want to compare the buzz of your game vs the competition, since they will be coming out just weeks apart from each other. As always, GameSpot’s Trax and other similar services by IGN and others are good tools to use. However, maybe your needs are different and you don’t want to cover the consumer editorial publications run by the big four media publishers in the industry but only cover the blogs run by gamers. Then a few of the tools listed below will do that for you. It’s not an exact science, but it’ll give you a good idea of what people are saying.

Ice Rocket Trends Tool

Ice Rocket’s trend tool allows you to compare the buzz on blogs across different search terms. You can only search for the last three months, so it might be something you want to track once a month and see how the buzz is shifting overtime. Here is the result we got for Army of Two vs World of Warcraft.

The results page allows you to see posts per day, average % and total posts over all. Also, if you click on your search term, then you can see all the posts that Ice Rocket is using to calculate your buzz. As I mentioned, it’s not an exact science but it’s a good place to start. Your online reputation and buzz is just as important as what people are saying about you in the real world.

RepuTrace

RepuTrace is a corporate security intelligence tool, as the website so boldly claims. However, RepuTrace isn’t just about analyzing what is out there, it also allows you to monitor, review and then communicate the information to everyone. The service also covers video and images, so it seems to cover everything that is the digital world. If you can afford the service and you liked the demo that they showed you, I say take it for a drive and try it out.

There will always be a few services that you use together to get a better picture of what is being said about you and your brand online. Analyzing data can always be one of the hardest parts, but if you don’t do it you are only hurting yourself. I’ve not personally used RepuTrace but a friend has and he said it’s quite useful, just a slight learning curve as you would get with any new piece of software.

Interact

After you’ve monitored and analyzed what is being said about you, you need to decide what you’re going to do next. How you react at this stage in the game says a lot about your understanding of the online world and the etiquette that needs to be followed. First, I want to look at a tool that will allow you to keep track of your interactions online and then we’ll look at leading your online assault.

co.moments

co.mmoents lets you track your comments online. If you are finding that a lot of blogs are writing about you and people are leaving questions and comments about your game. You can add your response to the blog and then have co.moments track what everyone said after you answered the question or commented on the blog post.

Co.moments really becomes more useful as you start posting on numerous blogs across the net and maybe even multiple posts on one blog or site. I know I have found the service useful when I’ve 20 different comments that I want to track and see what people are saying. You never know when you might want to follow-up on your original answer as someone might have asked another question from your response.

There aren’t many tools out there that actually allow you to keep track of your own online presence, which in some ways proves to be an opportunity to capitalize on for some. However, co.moments is the best tool right now and one I highly recommend your marketing/PR person use as they enter the online world and leaves comments all over the world.