• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 13, 2009

Casual squawkers on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and other online social sites have been known to make or break the reputation of a business or service. While the online chatter prompts companies to monitor and respond to reviews, Marchex Tuesday released a tool that pulls and aggregates data across the Internet.

The tool, Reputation Management, displays reviews in one dashboard. As part of the Marchex Connect platform, it aims at small- to-mid-size businesses (SMBs) that want to track what consumers have to say about their business and competitors. Marchex Connect supports hundreds of thousands of marketing campaigns for local advertisers.

Heinz Mikulka, CEO of Paule Attar Salon and Spa, Bellevue, Wash., has been testing the tool for about six weeks. He logs into the dashboard about once weekly -- not only to keep track of what consumers say about the Paule Attar salon, but competitors too. "It reminds me to check sites I otherwise sometimes forget," he says. "It would typically take me three or four times longer if I had to look at each site individually."

Mikulka calls the tool a timesaver because he doesn't have to search several sites to monitor the chatter. The dashboard aggregates in one tool data from Google Analytics, Citysearch, Yelp and more. Paule Attar Salon has one location, online booking, and Facebook page, but wants to know what consumers say about the salon and its competitors. The tools aim to mine data from local search queries, so businesses can understand what consumers say about them.

Matthew Berk, executive vice president of product engineering for Marchex, says the tools pull out key phrases to integrate more than 8,000 sources of content and data. "It stays on top of the problem that everyone has a slightly different listing for physical places in the world," he says. "We have filed a patent for that data problem. The system underneath this sucker does live aggregation across 8,000 sources. It has about a quarter of a billion pieces of metadata for 19 million local businesses, and aggregated 10 million ratings and reviews."

Yahoo, Twitter, Citysearch and others provide data through application programming interfaces (APIs). Marchex Reputation Management ensures the accuracy of information in existing online business listings found on general search sites, local search sites and directories -- such as consistent business name, address and phone numbers -- as well as making recommendations as to where to add new listings for more coverage. Information is refreshed daily. The tool flags negative and positive reviews with different icons.

BIA Kelsey estimated that E-mail, Reputation and Presence Management (ERPM) will reach $3.1 billion in 2013, up from $460 million in 2008. The number of SMBs using ERPM will increase from approximately 500,000 to nearly 4 million during that time.

As user-generated reviews continue to become more prevalent with consumers, local businesses want ways to protect their online reputations. Marchex Reputation Management aims to give SMBs that tool, allowing them to manage online reputations with details from one dashboard that are not readily available as a plug-and-play tool.

Features offered include charts that break out the percentage of positive, neutral or negative reviews in an easy-to-read display. Marketers can track mentions that tie information back to particular changes in the business or marketing efforts.

Keyword identification highlights top keywords and phrases to identify terms that differentiate the business and act as an alert to any customer service issues. The tool also includes competitive marketing analysis, so a business can compare other local businesses and analyze how its reputation and marketing efforts stack up. Marketers also can share positive news and reviews with customers and employees through email, Twitter, Facebook, Digg or other sources.