Ever knew what an Online Reputation Monitoring tool is? Well it’s exactly what it says, a tool that you use to have your brand under a big zoom.

BrandsEye is a new service by Quirk eMarketing, that you can use to protect your brand, track and quantify the exposure you have and see what other people are talking about you.

For those that haven’t heard what BrandsEye is about here is how it works.

They will track every piece of online text that mentions your brand, including blogs, press release websites, twitter and more other. It then tags and ranks them according to the relevance and the credibility of the source, in real time, and using a set of statistical learning algorithms and some sort of human intelligence processes they come out with the final score.

The score is highly customizable offering all sorts of charts that will help you better understand your brand and what it needs.

Who’s going to be interested

First thing that popped into my mind was that I am already able to track my brand (Alex Ion for example) for free, using services like Google Search, Google Notifications or Technorati. Why should I pay the rumored $750 price?

The answer was simple. They’re going after large brands, the upper end of the markets and they don’t plan to compete with the services I mentioned. Aim high is usually what makes money. They’re doing it.

Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk, had this to say about the small business query -

Quite simply it all comes down to target market. For small businesses, tools like Google Alerts and Trackur are fantastic, and much like SAP doesn’t have a “lite” version, its not our goal to compete in that market. We are more than happy for you to sit with your Google, Technorati and Twitter alerts as you are currently doing. But trust me, if you were a bank, you’d quickly come up short.

Anyone can track mentions online, i don’t even consider that a USP of ours. BrandsEye goes much further than just that

Diving deeper into the Brandseye app, we have been using it for the last month tracking ‘Charl Norman’ mentions and with the Blueworld press doing well we kept Brandseye quite busy! Some of the more notable functionality is to sort certain mentions according to importance of relevance. Like miss spellings of your brands or third party terms related to your brand. You can also track mentions for any specified term in your favourite reader via rss.

Tim Shier, Quirk’s Marketing Manager, further explained some of BrandsEye’s key functionality -

For example of a key distinguishing factor, BrandsEye provides rich, completely customizable, graphs of your reputation over time and the ability to draw out particular mentions. For example: all mentions of a member of your staff, which come from a consumer generated media, have high credibility and have bad things to say about their brand can be displayed and managed. (similarly an RSS feed for this combination can be setup so that as soon as a mention appears the relevant person is notified and can respond).

Screenshot of BrandsEye tracking ‘Charl Norman’ mentions