I want to start off by saying that this post is politically agnostic/secular. I realize that’s not always easy, so we’ll see if I can pull it off here or if it turns into a disaster.
I’m also going to show you a couple things that are almost completely backwards from what I’ve shown you so far with ontolo. There are some counterintuitive ways to use ontolo, and to interpret data from ontolo and what it might mean.
Trump: A Reputation Management Machine
Whatever your feelings are about Trump and his politics, two things might be agreed upon by anyone:
- He’s masterful at gaining large amounts of media attention.
- That attention is not always positive.
For that reason, he’s a clear choice to demonstrate how you can use ontolo for *some* parts of reputation management research.
If you do find that you, an executive at your company, or some other public situation would be best met with some action toward reputation management, I can, unequivocally, recommend Andy Beal and his consulting company, Reputation Refinery.
Now that I think about it, I’ve probably worked more hours with Andy than I have with anyone else in my life. He has strong ethics, knows how to enjoy himself (with frequent trips to Hawaii with his wonderful wife, Sheila, who runs the top Hawaiian travel blog, Go Visit Hawaii), and does wonderful work with the homeless through the Raleigh Rescue Mission.
On top of all of that, he’s:
- Written two books about reputation management, Radically Transparent and Repped.
- Runs an online reputation monitoring service, one of the first, Trackur.
- And runs a reputation management company, Reputation Refinery.
In addition to being the easiest person in the word to intro, he really, really knows his stuff when it comes to reputation management. So let’s hope I get this right.
Throwing a Bomb into the Bomb Factory
There’s an ethos that rose from the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s. And when I say “hacker culture,” I don’t mean it like it’s used today. I mean it as: gaining illegal entry into computers and networks.
That ethos is: Knowledge is Power.
While that’s still true today, as the cost of communication has come down – ie: it takes milliseconds, not months to get a message to the other side of the world – you could say that the ethos could be amended to:
Knowledge is power, and that power is amplified by your network.
Donald Trump understands this and has managed to influence the influencers to gain the attention he has acquired over the last several months. In his understanding that what gets published by the media is that which is most shocking, he’s also thrown a few bombs into the bomb factory, which he’s later had to defuse.
If I ever found myself in his situation, this is how I would use ontolo.
The Goal? Influence the Influencers
If I’ve just set off a firestorm in the media, and I need to calm that storm, what I need to do is go a level deeper, and influence the influencers.
In other words, the folks that are publishing about something that I just did, I need to go straight to them. And on the internet, that’s bloggers and social media.
Over the last few days, I’ve shown you how ontolo views a web page more like a human than a computer. It’s able to identify the main article, navigation, and comments. And, so far, I’ve shown you that links, social accounts, etc, that show up in the main article are the most important.
That’s usually true, but not today.
ontolo; Viewing Pages More Like a Human than a Computer
The benefit of splitting out a page into those three sections (ontolo actually splits it into several sections. Some of that will be discussed in Friday’s post, Behind the Scenes of ontolo’s Technology), is that you get a deeper insight into the intent of the publisher. If social media links in the main article can be considered “vouching” for the person, a social media link in the navigation is highly likely to be the account for publisher; be it a team of writers or a single blogger.
For reputation research, this is where ontolo can do what no one else can do: ontolo can find the publishers writing about a certain topic. Let’s see what that looks like.
Getting Started with Some Keywords
If you’re running a reputation management campaign, you’ll likely have specific occurrences or events that you’re working on directly. Due to polarizing nature of politics, I’m going to deliberately stay away from specific instances here.
What I *will* choose are broad terms that reflect language used by someone who might have a problem with someone else, and also general situations any candidate might find themselves in during an election:
- Donald Trump
- Donald Trump 2016
- Donald Trump beliefs
- Donald Trump Bernie Sanders
- Donald Trump candidate
- Donald Trump comments
- Donald Trump detractors
- Donald Trump disagree
- Donald Trump dislike
- Donald Trump election
- Donald Trump GOP
- Donald Trump Hillary Clinton
- Donald Trump ideology
- Donald Trump John Kasich
- Donald Trump nominee
- Donald Trump offensive
- Donald Trump opinion
- Donald Trump polarizing
- Donald Trump problems
- Donald Trump Ted Cruz
- Donald Trump wrong
I’m them going to add those keywords to these sections of the ontolo tool, to “Gather New Prospects.”
- Broad Search
- Content Marketing : Blogs
- Content Marketing : Reviews
- Content Marketing : Research
- Competition : Testimonials
- Experts : Authorities
- Experts : Interviews
- Experts : Question & Answer
- Organizations : Non-Profit
- Organizations : Conferences
- Organizations : Publications
- Organizations : Associations
- And, for kicks, Link Building : Submit Content
A couple minutes later, while it’s still running the last bits of prospecting, we’re at 26,239 prospects.
And when we search the term “Donald Trump”, we can see that 24,544 of our 27,459 documents (which have increased since the last screenshot) mention the words “Donald” and “Trump.”
And by the time we search the phrase, “Donald Trump,” we’ve now got 30,740 prospects, 26,083 of which have the phrase “Donald Trump.”
Let’s see what we’ve got in here.
Finding Bloggers and Social Media Accounts
Each of the 12 screenshots below is from the Content Marketing : Blogs search form. The idea here is to find bloggers and publications that are writing about Trump and using negative language in the article.
For each one, we’ll show the overview of Social accounts, Email addresses and contact forms, website counts in the Results set, then, finally, showing a small slice of the actual results, and how easy ontolo makes it to find contacts and who to reach out to.
Query: Content Marketing: Blogs: [Donald Trump offensive | offend | offends | offending | offended]
Social Media Accounts. Note how accounts appearing in the “Navigation” column often line up with the image two down for “Result Links.” This is how ontolo can help you make more insightful decisions about the meaning of links, accounts, etc.
Social Media Accounts:
Email Accounts and Contact Forms:
Search Result Sites and URLs:
Actual Result URLs:
Query: Content Marketing: Blogs: [Donald Trump wrong]
Social Media Accounts. Note how accounts appearing in the “Navigation” column often line up with the image two down for “Result Links.” This is how ontolo can help you make more insightful decisions about the meaning of links, accounts, etc.
Social Media Accounts:
Email Accounts and Contact Forms:
Search Result Sites and URLs:
Actual Result URLs:
Query: Content Marketing: Blogs: [Donald Trump detractors]
Social Media Accounts. Note how accounts appearing in the “Navigation” column often line up with the image two down for “Result Links.” This is how ontolo can help you make more insightful decisions about the meaning of links, accounts, etc.
Social Media Accounts:
Email Accounts and Contact Forms:
Search Result Sites and URLs:
Actual Result URLs:
Wrapping Up
As you can see, the nature of insights from ontolo lets you discover intents and insights with a very high level of precision.
If this is something you might be interested in, for this week only, we’re offering 10% off all plans, including yearly plans, which are already discounted 10%.
This Week’s Tutorials
I’m walking through various use cases this week. I’m guessing at least one, if not all, would be pretty useful for you. So be sure to read these each day this week.
Here’s the lineup:
- Monday: Content Marketing Research and Identifying Influencers
- Tuesday: Link Building
- Wednesday: Reputation Management Research
- Thursday: Competitive Analysis and In-Depth Influencer Research
- Friday: Behind the Scenes of ontolo’s Technology
And that’s that.
– Ben
p.s. If you feel like it might help to get some additional help with your reputation monitoring, I highly recommend Andy Beal’s Trackur for reputation monitoring. And if you’d like to bring in a consultant or agency, his reputation management agency, Reputation Refinery is among the best.