Requirements for a Comprehensive and Automated Web Reputation Monitoring System: First Iteration Luisa Mich             !!  " "#$%# Abstract Web reputation plays a critical role for companies and organizations, impacting their competitive positions and ultimately their success and survival on the market. User-generated content published on a variety of so-called Web 2.0 Websites are dramatically changing power relationships in business. Customers use more and more other customers’ judgments, comments, and reviews in their decision making processes. Companies needed to change their online communication strategies accordingly. However, a systematic approach to Web reputation monitoring, and in turn to the analysis of supporting systems is still lacking. Existing tools only partially support the complex process of Web reputation monitoring, usually applying natural language technology at different stages of maturity. This paper thoroughly investigates the high-level requirements for a general-purpose Web reputation monitoring system. Requirements are classified according to three main steps covering the tasks necessary to a comprehensive Web reputation monitoring strategy. To identify and illustrate the requirements, the paper refers to cases and examples in the tourism sector, whose complexity helps to realize a wide-ranging analysis, thus mitigating the risk of oversimplification. 1 Introduction This paper addresses the problem of tool-supported Web reputation monitoring. Marketing and communication managers have since long realized the critical impact -- positive and negative -- of online published and shared content on their compa- nies and organizations [1], [2], [3]. However, a comphrensive method to Web reputation monitoring is still lacking. Many of the existing approaches could be classified as solution or tool oriented. That is, they are based on existing automat- ic mining and analysis functionalities more than on a systematic requirements analysis. This situation is causing disappoint- ment both for the companies, investing without a positive ROI (Return On Investments), and for the solutions providers (also known as social-media-scanning companies), which in crisis times have more problems to sell their monitoring tools and ser- vices [4], [5]. Using software engineering best practices we want to contribute to a more systematic and goal-oriented approach to Web reputation monitoring. Starting from the definition of Web reputation and referring to an economic model that allows giving a context for business communication strategies, we obtain a conceptual framework for conducting a systematic requirements analysis. Requirements are related to three main phases of any reputation monitoring process and are identified accordingly. Also, a preliminary classification of existing tools for each step is conduced to add other requirements. To guarantee the generality of the obtained requirements, examples from tourism operators and organizations are used [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. These examples force considering requirements for a Web reputation monitoring systems in all its facets. In fact, tourism is a sector characterized by information, relationships and experience sharing. In eTourism, all Web 2.0 applica- tions are widely used by all stakeholders in all the possible ways (see for example, [11], [12], and statistics in eMarketer, www.emarketer.com). In the rest of the paper, Section 2 provides a definition of Web reputation and related concepts. Section 3 describes the main steps of a general monitoring process and the corresponding high-level requirements for a Web reputation monitoring systems. Section 4 concludes with some insights on open questions and future work. 2 Web reputation 2.1 Definitions and related concepts Reputation is a fuzzy concept, and there are a variety of definitions. Looking in a dictionary, for example in Merriam Web- ster’s, it is possible to notice that a shared issue is that of ‘how others view something or somebody’ (Fig.1): individual, com- pany, organization, political party, country, tourist destination, etc. If you are a company, your reputation is usually related to how your products or services are perceived by the consumers; of course it also depends on the intrinsic characteristics of your products or services and has to do with the image or identity of the company. As such, it determines the power of your brand and in turn the success of your company.