CrowdControlHQ has notable customers such as Cadbury and Hello! magazine, and serious competition from many other web media monitoring tools. It would be a difficult task to compare features without a demo from the company, but the current CrowdControlHQ advantage comes for companies in the UK that need a local web monitoring company for training and face-to-face feedback.
Judging from the online presence of CrowdControlHQ, with “coming soon” pages, and too few followers on their Facebook and Twitter profiles, this is a new company, that just entered the market. There is no “about” page on their website, and the first blog entry is dated November 18, 2010. The blog is also the source that told us that one of CrowdControlHQ’s co-founders is James Leavesley, and digging deeper, we found the second man behind the business, Calum Brannan. Both are seasoned professionals, with broad experience in social media – enough to recommend CrowdControlHQ as a viable resource.
CrowdControlHQ has started a PR campaign to promote its online media monitoring platform, described by the founders as a “reputation management software.” As many other social media monitoring tools, CrowdControlHQ enables users to see what is happening across multiple social media accounts, coordinate social media activity across teams, monitor social media key influencers and respond to them, moderate Facebook pages, track buzz (social media mentions), and understand competition.
With these features, CrowdControlHQ is a social media managing tool at best, and not a reputation management software. A matter of semantics perhaps, but not really. A reputation management software is the type of platform that allows you to control your online image by helping you create and promote the positive content you want people to see. A concrete example is ReputationDefender – the tool that allows you to increase positive content in Google, and block false, misleading or irrelevant content.
However, considering that brand monitoring can help businesses understand how best to protect themselves, CrowdControlHQ can be used to “manage reputations” in the sense that it allows businesses to deal with any problems that arise in real time – by responding in a timely manner to negative mentions, for example. There is, however, no way a company can “ensure slanderous comments aren’t being made without the brand’s prior notice,” as CrowdControlHQ co-founder suggested in an official press release that accompanies the company’s most recent PR campaign.