Heard about Reputica from Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization blog and asked for a test account so I can take a look.   I have several reasons for being interested in Social Media Monitoring; there's not much information on Reputica's site yet and I'm getting all the information from the Data Mining post and SMAttering.

"…28 June - London-based Reputica launched ReputicaRating, a social media analysis service with an emphasis on defensive monitoring and reputation management."

Hmm…. just what some clients of mine need.  In fact, I'll digress a little before getting back to ReputicaRating, to talk about an interesting thing I found out about today while I looked a client's reputation management problem.  

My client(s) turned out not to be forthcoming with me about enemies they have who are working against my blog social linking strategy - by employing Digg Gangs to prop up negative stories (which may, or may not have some truth in them) and then use the digg post to link back to a negative document that my clients wanted to disappear to the 4th page of search results. 

And the blog strategy worked - and then, all of a sudden, the negative documents were on the top of the search results again - even worse than before.  I used this Backlink Checker - http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker - which worked better than anything else and was free - that's how I discovered the Digg Gangs, and an Digg post with 750 Diggs….no doubt, my clients enemies had a role in manipulating Digg.

But there's little defense … if you've made enemies and your reputation is being attacked - it's most helpful to try to make peace with who ever is attacking you.  But what if you can't?   In any case - you need something, some tool that really monitors Social and Mainstream Media, and anything else that can be crawled, to find out what is being said about you or your company - so you can do something about it quickly…before it escelates out of hand.

Anyway…getting back to Reputica  - according to Datamining:

Reputica is a media monitoring service which includes its social media in it's analysis. The system provides a reputation rating - the Reputica Rating - for companies (brands? products?). It is interesting to note how seconds generation offerings in the social media analysis space often focus on a specific metric (BuzzLogic - influence, SentiMetrix - sentiment) whereas the pioneers have, due to the necessities of forging a new market, created offerings which are more horizontal (possibly, therefore, giving less depth to individual measurements). "  

I'll have more to say about Reputica if and when they give me access to take a look.

In general, the Social Media Committee of the Web Analytics Association, whom I'm the Director of, is interested in setting up standards for Social Media, along with the WAA Standards Committee.