Reporting Metrics

Every company has different requirements and priorities about what is important. Your particular industry may require more regulatory monitoring, e.g., healthcare and financial services. Once you have the tools in place, you can prioritize what needs to be routinely reported to management from what needs to be escalated immediately as a real threat. In Chapter 3, we defined the baseline list of threats that have to be monitored and defined the threat assessment process in Chapter 4. With your tools in place, prioritize this list and develop basic requirements for reporting measurements:

Copied sites Determine how often you look for fake sites.

Negative posts Measure negative posts and determine sentiment about your brand.

Misleading information Determine the threshold for when a response is necessary.

Fake profiles Catalogue all of your company profiles and look for fake profiles on those social media sites and on social media sites where you have never set up a profile.

Trademark/copyright infringement Catalogue your employees infringement of other company material as well as infringement of your own material.

Bad news coverage Daily searches for bad news and news in general about your company.

Confidential documents disclosure Daily searches for any of your internal documents that make it into the public sphere. You can do this with tools such as Google Alerts.

Complaint sites Identify customer complaints, whether real or fake.

Competitor attacks Daily searches of your competitor’s brands in association with your company name; again this is easily done with a free tool such as Google Alerts or with commercial tools such as Radian6.

Hate sites Catalogue any sites that are specifically targeted to your company or your industry such as Facebook pages dedicated to “Wal-Mart” hate posts.

Employee personal scandals Report on your employees’ activities as they relate to your company name.

Corporate scandals Report on any negative scandal that could affect your reputation.

Industry perceptions Report on overall industry metrics and sentiment.