I’m not sure where free tools come into play in my article. In the example I set forth, free tools were not the primary method of monitoring. The fees would have come from both strategy for response and the actuall implementation of addressing thousands of blogs, forums, tweets, and press releases that were spreading negative comments.

I was using a fairly comprehensive paid tool that I had double checked with other tools to ensure accuracy and comprehensiveness. So I couldn’t have saved the client money via the tool rather than free tool labor intensive charges.

I look at things from a slightly different perspective when it comes to half-baked ORM strategies. There have been a handful of examples where clients or potential clients have come to us because they realized (sometimes too late) that free tools left them vulnerable to reputation risk and sometimes significant reputation loss. Specifically, that these businesses were ill-advised by so-called “experts” that ORM could be done with free tools as well as any premium tool on the market.

Ironically, when it came time to deal with the reputation crisis, those same experts who free tools where now asking more in consulting fees than what it would have cost for a premium subscription, with a service that would likely have caught the incident in a timely manner and avereted the crisis. When it comes to raising the awareness bar, I think it is up to the experts entrusted with the responsibility to advise on ORM to make the clear distinction between doing ORM and doing ORM well.

This hits a nerve for me because while some might interpret the pitfall of these businesses being that they looked at ORM as a cost rather than an investment, ultimately some responsibility needs to fall back on the advice they recieved from folks that ought to have provided them with a wider range of solutions, and strategies comprehensive enough to include free and premium offerings.

There may well be a benefit to both Web audiences and the experts when endorsing free tools. However if the experts choose to endorse free tools purely to bolster ad revenue and site hits, then lets be fair and look at how these same endorsements for free tools come with a cost, especially when it interferes with devising effective ORM strategies because its scope is absent of any premium service offerings.

Thanks for listening to my

Joseph