As you may already know anything that happens to be related to online reputation concerns are near and dear to Marketing Pilgrim’s founder’s heart. After all, one of the most popular and even affordable social media monitoring solutions, Trackur, was born out of Andy Beal’s realization that just leaving your online reputation to chance is the equivalent of digital russian roulette.

Well another facet of protecting your online reputation is owning your online ‘presence’ as completely as possible. Our new Reputation Channel sponsor, KnowEm helps you do just that effectively, efficiently and without breaking the bank. As stated on the KnowEm site

Search over 575 popular social networks, over 150 domain names, and the entire USPTO Trademark Database to instantly secure your brand on the internet.

Just because Trackur is one of the largest and most talked about social media monitoring tools on the web, that doesn’t mean the company has been resting on its laurels.

You may have noticed that I’ve been somewhat of an absentee landlord here at Marketing Pilgrim, but there’s good reason for that. Today, Trackur announces its brand new user interface…and it’s sexy and it knows it!

For the past 6 months, we have been hard at work coming up with a new UI that would take Trackur’s social media monitoring dashboard to the next level. We wanted it to remain simple and quick to use, but at the same time, we wanted to push the design dial all the way up to 11!

Frank’s taking a needed break today, so you’re stuck with me. Remember me?

Of course, it doesn’t take much to get me back in the saddle, especially when a report is released about branding.

MillwardBrown has released its annual BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands in 2012. Among the findings are two little nuggets that caught my attention.

First up, news that once again Google has slipped in its rankings. Just two years ago, Google was the top brand on the list, but this year its gradual decline continues, with a drop to #3. I know, I know, that’s still pretty impressive, but a drop two years in a row sure does look like a trend to me. In fact, Google is dangerously close to being overtaken by McDonalds!

If you want to talk about whether the Facebook IPO was a success or not this probably is not the place for you. To be clear, the conspiracy theorist in me is alive and well and I think the whole thing is engineered for big money players to make bigger money and if you are a retail investor trying to figure this out you are playing with fire. (Since I am not an investor, I really don’t care if my opinion is right or wrong but you can say what you want about in the comment section.).

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at the real damage that is a result of the Facebook IPO. That is the venerable NASDAQ Stock Exchange. Well, maybe venerable is a strong word. Especially after how it handled the most talked about IPO in history. Venture Beat reported

If you are the person who has the responsibility of monitoring your brand’s reputation one of your greatest fears is that your CEO will be “found out”. Ask the folks at Yahoo today how it feels to put out the reputation firestorm that has been ignited by Scott Thompson’s “little white lie”.

Now the folks at AT&T look like they may have a cringe-worthy moment as their CEO, Randall Stephenson, is telling folks that when their Android device doesn’t update it’s not AT&T’s fault, it’s Google’s. The following comes from 9 to 5 Google reporting on Stephenson talking at a wireless conference

Stephenson blamed Google, claiming, “Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.”