In short, our updated software – release 0.4 - allows for more variables in the chart builder, trendwatches (e.g., 2010 with 2011) and more clearly illuminates where to improve what.

My.ComMetrics.com is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, which means you do not need to install anything on your end. We host and operate the application over the Internet for your use. This allows you to access our software virtually as and when you need it to track your blog’s performance.

This is the tool that prominent bloggers have made the talk of the town.

Article source – My.ComMetrics.com update: Release 0.4

We have been diligently working on improving our blog benchmarking software, so we can now provide you with additional useful features, such as:

- trends (now also across years),
- language, paragraphs, writing style, and
- resonance (links, conversation, etc.).

Before we continue, enter your email below and join our 2,300 subscribers who get updates about ComMetrics software direct to their inbox.

Below is one of the many charts that our updated program offers - as soon as you are logged in you are shown the impact page.

If you have not yet signed up, do so now to compare your competitors’ blog performance, watch the trends and improve performance with My.ComMetrics.com. We at CyTRAP Labs can help you improve your social media efforts.

Signing up for My.ComMetrics.com is the safe choice, because it’s free to try as a freemium user. Why not take us for a test drive?

- 3 minutes to sign up with My.ComMetrics,
- 4 minutes to claim and track your blog,
- 5 minutes to track your competition, and
- Read our free article, Corporate blog definition: 4 essentials

We created a short (1:45) video to show you how the new features can help you in the minimum amount of your valuable time (German version further below) (you can watch and share the video on Facebook).

Click here to view the embedded video.

German version - watch and share the video on Facebook

Click here to view the embedded video.

The above illustrates what makes My.ComMetrics.com invaluable, because it tells you where to start looking, allowing you to decide what to change first to improve performance the quickest.

Not only do you get your scores for each metric reported (Page Weight – 21, and Page Proximity – 84, above), but you also get a comparative score for the Fortune 100. This is perfect because it enables you to get your executives to take action. No one wants to look bad in comparison!

You can view and share the slides on LinkedIn or view them right here and click on the additional resources links within the presentation:

Almost three weeks ago we launched our ComMetrics blog checklist from CyTRAP Labs GmbH with

1. Social media definition: 3 essentials

You can still look forward to

9. 8 guidelines for fostering social media engagement (2010-10-27)
10. 5 corporate blogging trends for 2011 (2010-11-03)

A while back I wrote, Launching a blog – ropes to skip #1: Reputation management, which contained the following five tips:

1. Know your target group.
2. Long haul – it is all about serving a need.
3. Long or short-haul – it is all about branding.
4. Usability is the key – keep it simple, stupid (KISS).
5. Post whenever you want.

But since then, I have learned a few things, so here comes an update.

1. Reputation is key to managing image and brand

In short, reputation is how people talk about you when you are not in the room. No matter what a brand campaign tries to bring across, it will not succeed if your reputation is bad.

More specifically, reputation is often a consequence of a triggering event. Examples include someone’s experience with your customer service, and other visible actions and mistakes regarding environmental damage (e.g., Nestlé – KitKat vs. Greenpeace fiasco or BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster) or human rights violations.

Reputation is based on judgments made by the company’s clients, sharholders and bystanders (see also Barnett, M. L., Jermier, J. M., & Lafferty, B. A. (2006). Corporate reputation: The definitional landscape. Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 9(1), p. 26-38).

2. People don’t know what they want until they see it

If you manage to make the experience feel different, customers do not use prices at Ryanair or Swiss as a comparison to Virgin’s offerings. Instead, we are open to the new anchor that Virgin Atlantic prepared for us – being cool and cheeky (see commercial below).

Based on the image an airline has, consumers may be willing to pay more for being cool – a better experience. To illustrate this further, a customer may go to Starbucks for an overpriced Latte because of the experience, thereby failing to rationally compare this offering to another store’s cheaper and better coffee.

Starbucks’ or Apple’s respective reputations have little if anything to do with the price of the product, but primarily with ‘the different user experience’ these companies have managed to communicate to consumers.

3. Be clear that image can influence reputation

Image is what comes to mind when one hears the name or sees the logo of a particular company (e.g., Coca-Cola: Real thing or myth). These are the impressions one has about the company and the firm may play on this image, as illustrated by Virgin Atlantic’s latest advertisement.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The commercial plays on the catchphrase, ”Your airline’s either got it or it hasn’t.”  With the help of Virgin’s long-legged flight attendants, the commercial sells Virgin as a cheeky airline, more glamorous than EasyJet and more fun than Lufthansa. There is no plot and the sign-off gag is cute, if not hilarious.

However, the image of being cool can change and be replaced by something less positive the next time customers experience lost luggage thanks to Virgin Atlantic.

4. Failure-elimination helps improve reputation

I have a coffee machine from a company that uses Roger Federer as its brand ambassador, playing on Federer’s image as a sports star and family man with two kids.

But my opinion of the Jura brand has been formed primarily through its customer relationship management, not its image or the brand it promotes with the help of Roger Federer. To illustrate, I recently had trouble with our machine and sent a request for help via email. By the next morning somebody from the company’s customer service help line had called to walk me through some procedures, step-by-step. And yes, that fixed the problem.

I have had this experience with Jura’s customer service more than once. It always saves me time and hassle – a simple 10-minute phone call with a knowledgeable and friendly customer service representative does much good for a company’s reputation with a client. But if we have a bad experience with a product, the supplier’s reputation suffers, and we are unlikely to purchase again from the same supplier.

5. It takes years to build a reputation, but only a few weeks to destroy it

Starbucks can define and communicate its corporate brand and image. Nevertheless, its image and even more its reputation are the result of how clients and shareholders perceive them based on experience, so the company painstakingly builds its quality image over the years.

For instance, Toyota’s image for quality cars positively affected the resale value of used Toyotas for several decades in some markets like the US. Using maintenance and repair costs from thousands of users, Consumer Reports (an independent US publication) has published annual cost of car ownership figures in which Toyotas have done remarkably well for more than a decade. This and its stellar quality record helped Toyota build its ‘quality’ image and the value of its brand.

But that all changed drastically when in November 2009, Toyota acknowledged potential dangers from out-of-position floor mats on some models. In February 2010, Toyota recalled another 1.5 million vehicles in the US, Asia and Europe – including some of its priciest models (e.g., Lexus IS and GS) after discovering flaws in their brakes and fuel injection systems.

The way Toyota handled this recall crisis illustrates that one can manage a brand, but once customer experiences negatively affect the company’s reputation, including a large recall as in Toyota’s case, the damage to the company’s bottom line is substantial.

It will take Toyota and BP years to rebuild their respective brands and fully regain customer trust.

What is your take, what reputation strategies work for you? Please share your thoughts with a comment below!

Article source: 5 critical steps for reputation management

ComMetrics, a division of CyTRAP Labs GmbH, focuses on competitive benchmarking and social media analytics (e.g., developing the FT ComMetrics Blog Index – the industry standard for ranking corporate blogs of FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 companies).

Through My.ComMetrics.com, ComMetrics offers its clients the use of web-based software for social media monitoring, including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are valuable in enabling teams and companies to quickly evaluate the progress made against measurable goals, such as the ComMetrics Footprint. Effective KPIs for social media monitoring and tracking are:

specific, measurable, achievable, result-oriented & relevant, as well as time-sensitive.

By using My.ComMetrics.com you can easily visualize answers to your KPIs for social media tracking and analytics:

What social media measurements and metrics am I ahead or behind on?
How far ahead or behind am I in reaching the competitive benchmarks?
How do my competitors perform against these KPIs?

Actionable metrics help with data collection through My.ComMetrics.com to answer these questions and, most importantly, take necessary actions while tracking improvement.

Without key performance indicators, such as a 110 percent increase in your ComMetrics Footprint or other distinct objectives, your social media optimization will not reach its full potential.

HowTo.ComMetrics.com provides straightforward answers you need to use our tools more effectively, while saving time and improving your social media tracking and brand monitoring.

Why not register yourself right now – it’s FREE!

Alpha testing is critical to find any errors and flaws you may have missed in a program’s development. This post explains how we went about testing My.ComMetrics.com to ensure users’ satisfaction with the final product.

There are three types of land mines in software engineering that must be dealt with when developing software of any kind:

1) Defects: these cause the software to behave in unpredictable ways. Examples could be code showing up when it should not be, failure to handle mistakes properly or incorrectly completed calculations that inadvertently provide the user with inaccurate results.
2) Errors: these can be reduced by using quality assurance testing. The software might perform in a way contrary to what your customer expects. For example, the user enters a URL at My.ComMetrics.com, clicks on View Trend and in response the software provides an empty results page or an error as shown in the image above.
3) Flaws: these are generally viewed by the end-user as errors, without technically being an error within the developer’s code, such as presented data being correct but the visual leaves something to be desired (see image further below).

How to manage software development
To resolve this apparent conflict we need to realize that only defects cause future headaches, and therefore they must not be deferred. Hence, if your software fails to process data correctly, the information provided to the user will be useless.  If the program freezes (remember the Windows XP blue screen of death) the defect must be fixed before it causes harmful damage. Of course, Microsoft proves that one can still be successful while releasing software with defects.

If the software reliably serves you an empty result page every time, this is not a defect, but an error. Nevertheless, it can and must be fixed. By contrast, a flaw is more of a design issue than an error but again, the client expects a fix.

Defects are more critical and the risk of their presence should be minimized right from the start. Terence M. Colligan wrote Nine Steps to Delivering Defect-Free Software, all of which are still useful today, even though it is usually impossible to deliver perfect software right from the start.

Finally, some people call mistakes in software bugs, but we prefer to call them errors, because, for one thing, if they blow up they can do long-term damage. This often includes decreasing customer trust and confidence as discussed in the post Bugs versus defects – there are no bugs just land mines.

Where do alpha users come in?
Alpha users are required because the number of potential errors and flaws in most programs is too great to be able to test for all of them in advance. Instead, alpha users discover the land mines by making use of the software in infinite ways, putting the program through its paces and (hopefully) informing the developer of any eventual problems. They are also the ones who usually point out possible flaws or limitations a software tool may have.

The challenge for the developer is to prioritize the feedback provided and fix the most critical issues first, without forgetting all of the rest of the information provided by the alpha users. This makes alpha users the helpful individuals who enable the developer to refine and adjust the software before releasing it to the public for the first time.

Bottom line
Most projects come with costs that are impossible to quantify at the beginning, including defects. However, the danger with defects is that they can cause so many problems as to bring a project to a screeching halt. On the other hand, software errors are not that bad and can be fixed as needed. Eric Ries discusses this very nicely in his post Lean start-ups vs. lean companies.

In most cases, exhaustive testing is impossible because there are too many possibilities to test them all. For My.ComMetrics.com, we focused on minimizing the risk of software errors and finding the unexpected ones with the help of alpha users. In this way, we continue to refine and improve the software as you read, this thanks to your and other alpha users’ help!

Our question to readers and My.ComMetrics.com users is, what are your experiences with bugs versus defects – does how they are handled make a difference to you? Please share your thoughts and insights on this important issue by leaving a comment. Thank you.

Five steps to turn buzz into sales
Which FT Global 500 and Fortune 500 blogs made the FT ComMetrics Blog Index
Financial Times – is blogging good value?

What is the FT ComMetrics Index?
ComMetrics has developed a detailed methodology to benchmark corporate blogs. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index uses the same methodology, but a less-detailed version.

Why create such an index?
We thought creating this index this would help promote good practice as far as corporate blogging is concerned.

If you want to find actionable insights, you need to segment your benchmarking data: pinpoint the various sources, user behavior and outcomes. The FT ComMetrics Blog Index helps corporate bloggers achieve this objective.
More issues below.
Who is included?
Companies included in the Index are taken from the FT Global 500 2008, ranked by market capitalisation. Where possible we have indexed the top 25 from the following categories: the US, Europe and the rest of the world. In some cases we were unable to find a corporate blog. In other instances, the blog may be owned by a subsidiary.

This is the case with Berkshire Hathaway: its subsidiary Business Wired has a successful blog that we included in the list. A similar case is EON: its UK division has a blog, but we found no active corporate blog published by its German headquarters (see also Social Media Marketing in Deutschland).

The 2009 FT ComMetrics Blog Index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular Digital Business supplement and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.
Please subscribe now so you can claim your corporate and/or personal blog AND trace those that you want to compare yourself to.
For Twitter, please use #hashtag ➡ #FTCBI

Our next stop was the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. It has a few blogs that qualify using the criteria we developed for identifying corporate blogs. Really great job these people did in collecting all this important information, have a look.

Another big help was Peter Kim, who put together A List of Social Media Marketing Examples, (Bernhard Warner also recommended this list). Kim has an impressive list of a vast number of social media marketing examples. Sometimes it mentions brands (not necessarily the corporate owner of the brand) and other times, as in the case of IKEA, customer blogs are listed. This is no obstacle, however, and the list is just plain impressive. By the way, another blog that you have to read, his other stuff is impressive too.

The next step was a tweet to Twitter followers, which garnered a nice response from Michael E. Rubin. He suggested Alltop – all the corporate blogs and Feeds of the Blog Council. Of course, this should have been done earlier, since we ourselves are a member of the Alltop Social Media blog crowd.

We also found a ‘white paper’ (five pages but not much detail) and some presentation slides of a survey that included 132 Nordic companies, all with a market capitalization of more than 1 billion euro. There were a few only that had blogs, most we had included already. Check out Corporate blogging amongst listed Nordic companies, it is interesting reading.

Are we still looking for more blogs?
Yes, we are. Please tell us about yours. Companies often have several blogs listed in our database. For instance, all of Hewlett Packard’s numerous blogs are being tracked; naturally, the best one will be included in the Index.

If you want to check out who is already included, visit the
FT ComMetrics Blog Index

If you have a blog that we should track for the Index, tell us about it by leaving a comment below with the blog URL(s).

If you want to see how you compare to others, check out FTindex.ComMetrics.com (you must be registered to view data/statistics).

When will it be published?
The 2009 index will appear in the Financial Times newspaper’s regular supplement on Digital Business and its webpage (www.ft.com/digitalbusiness) on Wednesday, May 13.

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More resources:
FT/ComMetrics Blog Index