The document outlines requirements for a comprehensive automated web reputation monitoring system. It discusses how web reputation is a complex concept to monitor due to the variety of online spaces and high volume of content. The proposed system would identify relevant online spaces and items, then analyze and classify items through sentiment analysis and conceptual models. This would allow organizations to monitor web reputation beyond just sentiment to support customer relationship management and decision making. While current tools have limitations, the outlined requirements could help improve web reputation monitoring systems.

1. Requirements for a Comprehensive
and Automated Web Reputation
Monitoring System: First Iteration*
Luisa Mich
SWSTE2012 - IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Science, Technology and Engineering
DOI: 10.1109/SWSTE.2012.15

2. Outline
Web reputation (WR):
• definition and related concepts
• why WR matters
• monitoring WR
Requirements for a WR systems
• a three steps process
Discussion and conclusion
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.2

3. Difficulty of elaborating the inputs
to obtain aggregated and
significan information: general
data as the n. of occurency of a
word is easy to obtain, more
difficult is to intepret this info. Eg,
counting people complaining of a
specific problem is not enough
without semantic
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.3

4. Reputation: definition
is a fuzzy concept, and there are a
variety of definitions
a shared issue is that of how
others view something or
somebody: individual, company,
organization, political party,
country, tourist destination, etc.
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.4

5. Reputation and the Web
Reputations has to do with your
image:
• depends on the characteristics of
your products or services
(intrinsic issues)
• is related to how your products
are perceived by the consumers
(relational, communicative
issues)
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.5

6. On-line vs. off-line reputation
The Web is changing everything,
especially User Generated Content
(UGC), which contributes more
and more to determine WR
On-line communication offers new
potentialities and introduces new
risks
• see, e.g., http://www.internetworldstats.com;
http://www.theconversationprism.com/
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.6

7. WR: The hell
amplified
e-word of
mouth
About TripAdvisor
www.tripadvisor.com/pages/about_us.html
TripAdvisor-branded sites make up the largest travel community
in the world, with more than 50 million unique monthly visitors*,
and over 60 million reviews and ...
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.7

8. WR: the heaven
amplified eword of
mouth
• direct/social
media
marketing
• real-time
feedback
Social Media Starfish, Scoble, Barefoot
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.8

9. Web reputation matters!
determines the power of your
brand and in turn the success (and
survival) on the market …
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.9

10. Monitoring WR
Reputation is a complex concept; WR
is even more complex
Challenges:
• Competitors are a click away
• Real-time content (e.g., Twitter)
• Quick and large “influence”
• (Very) large numbers involved
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.10

12. Monitoring WR: A first set of high
level requirements
1.Identify the relevant online spaces
to be monitored
2.Identify relevant items - posts,
comments, reviews, mentions - in
the selected spaces
3.Analyze and classify these items
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.12

13. Identifying online spaces
There are a bunch of tools and online
spaces; many referred to as Web 2.0:
blog, wiki, social networking website, …
The problem is getting worse with time
Social networks and other social media
evolution, and success are far from
being understood and foreseeable;
some pictures to illustrate these issues
…
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.13

14. Ex: the italian province of Trentino
for tourism, official B2C web site
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.14

15. Trentino as a tourism destination:
Online Travel Agencies
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.15

16. Trentino as a tourism destination:
review sites
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.16

17. Trentino as a tourist destination:
blogs, social networks
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.17

18. Classification of the spaces
From an organization’s point of view
there are three kinds of spaces:
• Official: Websites B2C, B2B, microsites
• Semi-official: official presences with
partial control, e.g., YouTube brand
channel, fan pages on FB, corporate
wikis, blogs …
• Beyond the organization’s control:
uncontrolled spaces, e.g., social
networks, independent blogs, etc.
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.18

19. Identifying online spaces vs. the
proposed classification
Organizations are aware of those
in the first two levels
The problem of identification is
critical for spaces in the third level
Two possible approaches:
• Bottom-up: from mentions to
sources (brute-force approach)
• Top-down: from strategies to
sources (goal-driven approach)
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.19

20. Bottom-up approach
Uses search engines or alert tools
to look for those spaces in which
the monitoree is mentioned;
keywords related to the brand,
name, geographical info
Quick, easy, free, but difficult to
apply for monitoree whose name
are common (e.g., ‘mich’, ‘berry’,
‘post’, etc.), low efficiency, low
precision
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.20

21. Top-down approach
Based on the analysis of:
• the monitored domain or sector
• targeted markets
• users’ profiles
• company’s goals
• data on the use of Web 2.0 spaces
Complex, mainly manual
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.21

22. Guidelines
Look in:
• general-purpose social networks and
social media due to their large
audience
• domain-related spaces, because
customers use them
• news web sites
• ….
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.22

23. Guidelines (c’d)
E.g., for a hotel
• the most successful social
networks; FB, TW, YT for many
markets, but not for all
• Review and online agencies’ sites,
e.g. TripAdvisor and Expedia
Very little support is given to the
identification of spaces to be
monitored
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.23

24. Identifying relevant items
Not all the items on a monitored
space are relevant (mentions)
There can be a huge number of them
Their identification is not easy:
different languages, access rules,
format, standard, style, structure,
fraudulent posts, etc.
Many tools are specialized, e.g., for
Twitter
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.24

25. Example: RIM Web reputation
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.25

26. L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.26

27. Factors mitigating the risk to miss
critical mentions
Inter-connected sources (e.g., FB
vs. TW)
Viral spread of the items
Null impact of many items: most
tweets (70%)in Twitter are
ignored
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.27

29. Analyzing and classifying
the items
Identification of the opinion of the
author with respect to some topic,
polarity: positive, negative or
neutral (or other scales)
Sentiment analysis, applying
linguistic techniques of different
complexities: computational
linguistics, text analytics and
natural language processing (NLP)
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.29

30. L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.30

31. Conceptual models of the content
Which items are relevant and what is
the user saying in each item? What is
he or she speaking about?
• We propose to (semi-automatically)
develop conceptual models of the
content (semantic annotation)
Concepts are used to define concepts
- drivers - and their characteristics
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.31

32. Example: conceptual model for WR
monitoring of a tourism
destination
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.32

33. Characteristics for one of the
drivers: museum
DOMINIO
LINE – MUSEI ED ISTITUZIONI
PRODUCT
- EVENTI
FEATURE – PART
- MICROEVENTI
QUALITA’
CULTURATURISMO IN
TRENTINO
MART (Competitor: MUSEO MADRE
NAPOLI, GAM TORINO, MUSEO DI
ARTE CONTEMPORANEA BASILEA,
MUSEION BOLZANO
GUGGENHEIM BILBAO,
MOMA NY)
MUSE (Competitor: ACQUARIO DI
GENOVA, DEUTSCHES MUSEUM
MONACO,NEMO OLANDA)
GALLERIA CIVICA TRENTO
(Eventuali Competitor)
CASTELLO BUON CONSIGLIO
(Eventuali Competitor)
ELENCO DEI PRINCIPALI MUSEI
TRENTINI (Con Eventuali Competitor):
MUSEO GUERRA ROVERETO
CASA D’ARTE FUTURISTA DEPERO
MUSEO DELL’AERONAUTICA
CAPRONI
MUSEO USI COSTUMI GENTE
TRENTINA
MUSEO CIVILTA’ SOLANDRA
MUSEO STORICO TRENTINO
MUSEO RETICO SAN ZENO
ARTE SELLA
FORTE BELVEDERE
MUSEO CIVICO ROVERETO
MUSEO PIANOFORTE ALA
MUSEO DIOCESIANO
VILLALAGARINA
LE VARIE
MOSTRE
MICROEVENTI:
CONFERENZE,
TESTIMONIAL,
VERNISSAGE
COSTI
ACCESSIBILITA’:
PARCHEGGI, NAVETTE,
COLLEGAMENTI VARI,
DISVERSAMENTE ABILI
LOCATION EDIFICIO
ESTETICA
ALLESTIMENTO
CONTENUTI
FLESSIBILITA’: ORARI
SERVIZI ACCESSORI:
BOOK SHOP,
CATALOGHI,
RISTORANTE
VARIETA’
DELL’OFFERTA –
SELEZIONE
DIVERTIMENTO,
INTRATTENIMENTO
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.33

34. Other requirements
Let’s go back to the concepts
related to reputation: quality,
judgment, and people to look for
other requirements
Quality comes in different types!
For each of them, the company
had a gap to fill in
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.34

35. Different types of Quality
Quality
Expected
Designed
Delivered (issued)
In use
Perceived
Unexpected (latent)
the quality users wait for to satisfy their needs
the quality the company has planned to offer to the user
result of the transposition ‘design’ into a product or service
perceived by the user in specific use contexts
quality users believe have received as compared to expectations
satisfies needs new to users
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.35

36. Innovation
Re-design
Improve
usabilty
Communication
strategy
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.36

37. Other requirements (c'd)
People: concepts related to needs of a
WR system able to use gathered data
to support CRM (Customer Relationship
Management) at two levels:
• operational, often related to complain
management
• analytical, to support decision making
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.37

38. Existing tools and systems
Alert tools, keyword based; send email
messages to inform of the publication of
an item; free; low recall and precision
• Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts,
SocialMention, TweetBeep
Reputation analysis systems:
• Collect and analyze items from the Web,
giving information on the sentiment;
some include competitors
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.38

39. Existing tools and systems (c’d)
• Give qualitative and quantitative
ouput, using dashbords or other
visualition tools
• Many are domain or industry
dependent, e.g. ReviewPro for hotel
reviews; work on different languages;
have different versions starting from a
free basic one; work for a given
Website, e.g., ReviewMetrix for
TripAdvisor, or type of sites, e.g. blog,
BlogPulse
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.39

40. Other systems worth to be
mentioned
Norton: a reputation based security
system; documents!
Directorate of Tourism Milan: a large
project, impact of events (e.g.
soccer vs. fashion)
Cream: exploits a full NLP system
Tools to identify untrue posts: see
projects at Waterloo University
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.40

41. None of the existing systems, to
the best of our knowledge:
• supports conceptual modeling for
initializing WR monitoring, that
could be based on systems like
Cerno (TXL rules)
• classifies mentions according to
the quality types
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.41

42. Other challenges
Integrating the WR system into
the company Information System
Addressing the ethics issues: WR
vs. censorships
Teaching the importance of WR
Dissemination of best practices for
WR especially among smallmedium companies, and individual
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.42

43. Conclusions
We have identified a set of
requirements to improve existing
WR systems or to design an
integrated platform supporting WR
management beyond reputation
intelligence and sentiment analysis
Some of these requirements are
innovative, as none of the existing
systems does satisfy them
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.43

44. Open questions and future work
We have almost completed the
requirements identification step
We are planning the next steps of
our research, looking for ideas,
partnerships, funds ☺
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.44

45. Discussion
High level requirements
(partially) validated in real
projects
Trentino, dolomiti, val di fassa
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.45

46. Credits
Have collaborated in the cited WR
research:
Nicola Zeni, Nadia Kiyavitskaya, Michela
Defrancesco, Andrea Casagrande,
Cogito, VisitTrentino, and other
members of the eTourism research
group of the University of Trento
Many anonymous, volunteer and non
volunteer, and unaware users publishing
on the Web
L. Mich - Requirements for a Web reputation monitoring system, Pg.46