Reputation Management for WordPress (Free Plugin)

I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for WordPress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.

Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your WordPress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.

Download & Installation

To download the plugin, simply click on this link. For now you can only install the plugin by uploading the folder to your server via FTP but I will be adding it to the WordPress Plugin depository shortly. Once you have extracted the folder from the .zip file, simply upload it to the plugins folder on your server:

wp-content/plugins/

It’s important that you upload the actual folder, and not just the files. Your folder structure should look like this:

wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/

Once you have uploaded the folder simply go to the Plugins area in your WordPress Dashboard and activate Reputation Management for WordPress.

You will then see a new menu item in the Settings Menu:

You can tweak the plugin from there.

How It Works

When you go to edit the plugin settings you will see the following panel. I’m going to run through each of them one by one and show you what they do:

1. This field allows you to enter keyphrases that you want to track around the web. The results are currently taken from Google blogsearch and Technorati. Some examples keyphrases here may be your name, the name of your blog, the name of your products, or even the names of your staff. Right now I’m simply monitoring “glen allsopp” and viperchill.

You can separate keyphrases with a comma and if you use multiple words in a phrase then it’s best to put it in quotes so it only shows results where those two words are next to each other.

2. Here you can enter how many results you want to show for each keyphrase. Entering 1 will show 1 result for each phrase from Google Blogsearch and 1 result from Technorati. Entering 2 in this form will show 2 results from each, and so on.

3. This is a cool feature I wanted to add which lets you link to any of your favourite bookmarks or other places where you want to check your brand reputation. For example you could link to Twitter search results for your name and have quick access to them. The HTML code for that would be:

<a href=”http://search.twitter.com/search?q=viperchill”>Twitter</a>

Simply change the word after q= to whatever you want to search Twitter for.

4. The bottom HTML functions exactly the same as the top, you just get an option to put the links wherever you want.

Once you’ve saved your changes, head to your Dashboard and you should see something like this:

You can click the ’show more’ link to scroll through updates, and click ’show latest’ to see the most recent updates again.

Planned Updates

I’m very happy with the plugin but my beta testers have already given me some more ideas on what to improve. Current planned updates are:

• Being able to see how many new items there are
• Being able to enter negative words so listings won’t show if they are in there
• Adding more services to monitor
• Possible tabbed options between each monitored service

This is really a side project for me so I can’t promise that any of these are going to be implemented but if there’s a big reaction to this then I will probably go ahead and do them.

Go test it out and let me know what you think!

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Tags: Free, Management, Plugin, Reputation, Wordpress