More and more companies in Italy engage in online conversations monitoring, in order to have a finger on the pulse of their online reputation. The article by Enrico Grazzini, on November 7^th issue of Corriere Economia – a weekly supplement of Italian Newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, revolves around this topic.

As highlighted in the article, “today, the reputation of a company is in great measure built online, for good or for bad” and for this reason more and more firms specialized in “interactive public relations”, or in “web monitoring”  like Blogmeter, constantly analyze conversations on blogs, forums, newsgroups, social networks, and news websites.

Web monitoring allows to provide a better service, to collect and to make use of the most interesting ideas from customers, and to timely address possible critical comments. This is the opinion of Pepe Moder, Digital Marketing Director of Barilla, one of the Italian companies most attentive to online dynamics. Moder lays the accent on the need, in case of critics coming from the web, to engage in a two-way symmetrical communication with users, because “online you cannot impose anything”.

Companies the likes of Telecom Italia or Unicredit also pay a lot of attention to users’ opinions, and so do other big groups like Pirelli, Fiat, Nokia, Danone, Granarolo, L’Oreal, Volkswagen e Renault, Geox, Microsoft and Wind.

Sacha Monotti, co-founder of Blogmeter, brings the attention on the fact that “also many small companies understood the importance of online reputation monitoring. Perhaps they use basic tools. Only a specialized approach guarantees a well-timed alert”

You can find the article here, or at page 32, Corriere Economia, November 7th 2011