Who is Chatmeter? Meet Our Brand Audit Guru!

Without a doubt, the desk that gets the most visitors on a daily basis is that of our brand auditor, Sasha. I know this because I sit next to her and get to enjoy the wonders of her work. Sasha, who is part of the marketing team, runs the local reputation audit for future customers. Because Sasha’s job is such a vital part of our process, naturally she was the first person I wanted to interview in our very first installment of the “Who is Chatmeter?” series.

If you’re interested in working with Chatmeter, this is your chance to find out what exactly goes into our brand audits when you hit that Schedule A Demo button.

What goes into building an audit?

“3 cups of coffee!!” She laughs.

“No, the very first thing I do when I get into the office is look to see if anyone has requested an audit report.” These are typically submitted by our Business Development Representatives who help businesses analyze their brand and see where Chatmeter can help them improve.

“I start with a simple Google search looking for as many locations as I can find. We always run audits on 10 locations. I look for 2 good locations and 2 really bad locations, the rest are somewhere in between. For agencies, I just focus on one of their clients.” Sasha searches Google Maps to find these locations manually and then our system will confirm how well each location is managing their local SEO. By getting a variety of positive, negative and neutral locations brands can get a complete picture of how our platform identifies various issues. They can also see instantly which locations are doing well and which locations need some work.

“I gather the listed business names and locations in a spreadsheet, add their primary Google My Business category, identify their proper keywords [for rankings], and upload all of it into our dashboard for our Business Development Team to review.”

What should businesses typically expect to see in their first audit?

“It’s going to be insightful! Most of the time we find things people don’t know about their business. We usually find duplicate listings, incorrect business information, eye-opening reviews and a ton of crazy photos. The tabs featuring reviews and media are typically the most insightful for businesses when they first view our product.” Large enterprises often don’t have the ability to see their local impact at each location. Looking at an audit for the first time and seeing how your individual locations are affecting your overall local brand reputation offers more insight than you may think.

When going into a brand audit, there’s going to be a lot to take in. Our dashboard has 9 different tabs each focusing on a unique area of your local brand presence. When you go through a brand audit with your account representative they will review each area of our dashboard and how it can improve your brand’s reputation. When first looking at our product here’s what you can expect to see in each of our tabs:

• Snapshot – Get an overview of your brand performance and assess the strength of your brand’s reputation through our LBV score.
• Reviews – Take a look at all your reviews on various sites. You can see how often you’re responding and your average ratings. You can also take a look at how your competitors’ review strength is compared to yours.
• Social – View trending hashtags, see your follower count, track your social live feeds, and even take a look at which locations are most active on social media. We also have a publishing tool to help you improve your social media presence.
• Pulse – In this tab, you can view the sentiment of your customer feedback. Our AI pulls in the most popular topics your customers are talking about and then analyzes how they feel about those topics. Are they happy with your customer service or not? Did you launch a new service or product recently? Our dashboard can analyze customer sentiment on the topics that mean the most to your brand. This tab is perfect for identifying issues in individual locations.
• Media – This tab shows what your customers (and employees) are visually posting about at your locations. Instead of relying on hashtags and social mentions, photos and videos are pulled into the dashboard from geolocation tags near your business locations. This feature is unique because it allows you to see media that you wouldn’t be able to find in a simple search on social media.
• Listings – Here you can find the accuracy of your listings across every major business listing site. Our dashboard analyzes the accuracy of your name, phone number, address, and even which listings were recently created. Our listing management tools and reports help you find the listings that need to be cleaned, optimized or updated.
• Rankings – Want to see where you’re ranking in local listings? On this tab, you can take a look at exactly where you rank across a variety of search engines and maps for your most important keywords.
• Review Builder – This tab helps you collect feedback from customers by building surveys. Learn how to build, collect and display reviews on your website through a widget using our review builder.
• Workflow – This tab shows you every task you need to do to improve your local brand visibility. Take a look at this tab and see exactly where to begin once you purchase the Chatmeter product.

Each of these areas offers a unique way to improve your brand’s reputation. When you go through an audit you’ll not only get to see what these tabs do but you can also learn how to instantly make improvements to your digital presence. Unlike with a small business, multi-location enterprises are not always able to know what’s going on at the local level. Our platform helps large enterprises to get a grasp on the local impact of each individual location, all in one place.

Our workflow tab gives businesses a list of the top changes they need to make in order to improve their local SEO right away. “Usually there are 8 tasks per store that need to be addressed. If you have a very low digital presence there’s going to be even more things you need to do.” I feel like this is a good time to point out Sasha talks with her hands, so as she mentioned this workflow list her hands spread further and further apart. This gave me the impression the workflow tab could get extensive if you’re not currently doing anything to manage your brand’s reputation.

“The good thing is, if you don’t have the time to take care of all your workflow items, we have a Listings Management team that can help take care of any tasks related to listings for you. Then you can focus on other things like responding to reviews, building up your social media presence and more.”

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in an audit?

“I love the media tab! I always find hilarious photos. In one specific audit, an employee at a car dealership took a picture every single day in his work clothes giving the middle finger. It was just endless pictures of him in the same outfit and pose.” An important thing to mention here is that the employee didn’t @mention or #hashtag the business in the photo caption. We found these photos because our media tab locates images and videos using geolocation tags, not social mentions.  “It was pretty funny to uncover, but I had a feeling the business didn’t like that very much.”

Don’t worry, this example is not typical of most audits, the photos we find are generally positive. The media tab is a great way to see how people are interacting with your brand. “I always find great product placement photos in these audits. It’s like free advertising for a brand.”

Based on what you’ve seen in your work, what’s something you think businesses should know?

“Listings are super important. If you want to be visible and trusted by search engines and customers, you need to make sure all your locations are correct. Clean your listings first and make sure you respond to reviews. The other thing is to try and do more social media because oftentimes the social tab is very empty. Not having a social media presence is a huge missed opportunity for a business. Even if you only have time to add photos, it helps a lot.”

I love working at Chatmeter, why do you?

“I learn something new every day! Everyone here is so welcoming. People are always open to hearing your thoughts on how to improve things and they’re eager to teach you anything you want to know.”

“The people at Chatmeter are really fun. Although we care about doing a great job, we’re pretty informal here. You can walk up to anyone’s desk and ask them a question without having to set a meeting, it’s really nice.” And there’s always a line at Sasha’s desk as she’s vital to helping us perform demos.

Our Founder and CEO, Collin Holmes, really stresses the importance of a good work-life balance. What does your life outside of work look like?  

“I love to read and paint with watercolors. I’m huge Star Trek fan so Comic-Con last week was pretty exciting for me. Also, I live in North Park so there’s always something to explore.” For those of you not familiar with San Diego, North Park is our hipster neighborhood where there’s always something going on. “I also love to run, I’m training for a half marathon right now!”

Sasha gave me a whole new perspective on what goes into a brand audit. She’s pretty much a superhero when it comes to helping brands understand how our platform works. Thanks for your hard work and good luck on your marathon, Sasha!