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Monitoring a company's reputation on the Internet is trickier than it seems. It's not just a matter of typing the company's name into a Google search and reviewing the results. Big companies with numerous subsidiaries or many trademarks also need to check variations, common misspellings and nicknames for their brands.
And because much of the Internet isn't accessible to the major search engines-many sites, including discussion boards, aren't indexed publicly and won't show up in standard search engine results-- marketers need a way to monitor these channels, too.
Enter companies such as Cyveillance Inc. and Cymfony Inc. that offer so-called Internet brand intelligence. Among their services: monitoring of online discussions about companies, watching for fraudulent use of trademarks or other infringements, and keeping an eye out for the appearance of company hate sites such as compaqsucks.com.
"Frankly, these are things we tried to do internally, but we have so many different brands-a Liberty Mutual brand, a Wausau Insurance brand, so many different companies that all have their own Web sites-that it just wasn't practical," said Christopher Sloane, an assistant VP and senior corporate counsel for Liberty Mutual, a $13.5 billion business and consumer insurance company headquartered...