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Sometimes I find it hard to tell the difference between a good idea badly executed and a plain old bad idea. This is one of those times.

Reputation HQ is a “socialprise web application that bridges the gap between Social Media and enterprise ORM”.

Yes, I had to look up ORM as well - it stands for “Online Reputation Management”. Which hints at the “badly executed” part. While the site looks relatively slick and Web 2.0 compliant, the copy has been written by folks who don’t travel to work on the Cluetrain. Or use a spell checker.

But is the tool itself a good idea? I’ll admit to being a bit slack with reading my own press, even though I know that getting out there and spending a little bit of time on it everyday, even if you only pick up on a tiny percentage of what is being said, is a very useful past time. I just never get round to setting up all those Google Alerts*, or reading them when I have done. A tool that could help me with this, by gathering everything together into one place, might just get me over the line with doing it.

And then add in the capability to share the responsibility across your enterprise, and I genuinely do see somethng neat.

Someone smart should go out there and build this though, as this implementation is not the one that an organisation like Hill & Knowlton is one day going to license from you for millions of dollars a year.

* In an aside, I was interested (scared even!) to see Google (presumably) eating their own dogfood here and keeping track of my off the cuff comments about my experiences with using the forms feature of Google spreadsheet.