Search engine optimization
marketing firm aimClear has developed a tool giving marketers a method to manage reputation across a variety of search engines, social sites and forums faster than Twitter clients can send tweets to a
mobile device.
Think Google Alerts, but for nearly every forum and social site on the Internet that churns out information in near real-time. The email alerts trigger within 30 to 60 seconds
after a blog posts nearly from any channel, including data extraction behind log-in walls.
The tool, aimClear Alerts, offers a method to filter and manage a company's or person's reputation by
drilling down into channels like YouTube, Digg and Yahoo Answers, creating custom alerts for clients based on users of specific channels. It offers advanced semantic criteria for what generates an
email alert "wicked fast," says aimClear Founder Marty Weintraub.
"It could become very expensive, otherwise, if you think about what it would cost to take the 50 keywords you ordinarily
monitor," Weintraub says. "This alert system will pull from forums or other sites, pretty much anyplace but Facebook because it puts up so many barriers."
For Facebook, aimClear will take feeds
from Microsoft Bing to get what it needs. The data tool pulls from feeds and semantically filters comments, redistributing the information to predetermined lists of people in the form of alerts. There
are hundreds of thousands of forums. By importing a PST file it can service a distribution list at the keyword level. There's no do-it-yourself Web interface, but aimClear will set up the service.
The cost is not cheap to monitor the forums. It runs about $10 per keyword a channel per month for between one and 10 keywords, but it monitors every new post for semantic variables between the
headline and body copy, even negatives like exclusions.
The biggest challenge became building the engine to determine how to take extremely large data feeds that populate quickly and filter it
by semantic and other criteria to distribute the content to groups of users.
Weintraub designed the tool after a client complained about someone spreading negative comments about them. So,
aimClear built the tool to monitor users in specific channels. "The tool doesn't solve every reputation monitoring problem on Earth, but most of them," he says.