The complaint was passed on to the store by customer services, following which the store’s manager, Bakry, promptly banned me from the store. He did not deny that my complaint was valid, but was told that I was banned simply becauseI I had made the complaint in the first place.

Perhaps this is consistent with McDonalds training practices. It would appear that you have to accept their adverse practices without question or suffer the consequences, as I myself did.

First time stopping-by and I wanted to thank-you for posting your top 6 links.

As far as free tools go, and the list you compiled, I would like to also suggest trying Ask.com’s blog search.

My experiences reveal that doing a proper job of monitoring one’s online visibility and reputation requires depth in media sourcing (i.e. blogs, message boards, groups, consumer and gripe sites, social networking sites, video’s and images).

Social media measurement of impact and influence ought to be exhaustive and far-reaching, and in this regard free tools can present many limitations. The other point is that the usefulness of News is dwindling because by the time negative publicity has hit the mainstream, it may already be too late to manage the damage.

In the shared spirit of spreading the word that companies ought to regularly monitor their online brands and reputation, if you’re readers find the task of online monitoring too daunting, are just too busy, or are looking for assistance from a paid service, we would be more than happy to help.

Thanks,

- Joseph

A friend of mine forwarded me your post and I thought you and the community should check out a tool that we, at the world bank, recently released in open source. It’s called the buzzmonitor. It is a “super aggregator” with a number of 2.0 features that allow to build vertical views of the web.

Salon.com (and other blogs) talked about it http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/06/18/buzzmonitor/index.html and it has so far been downloaded over 1300 times. You need to be a bit tech savvy to install it but it’s a pretty useful tool.

Learn more and download it here: http://buzzm.worldbank.org

Cheers,

Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski
World Bank

Thanks for the link!

You’re based in Yorkshire, aren’t you? That’s where Duncan (my business partner) and I grew up and my brother (head of search marketing at Distilled) is still based in Leeds. You guys should catch up at some point – he’s tom at distilled.co.uk.