Before you start actively blogging or using social media for your business, it’s important to put some measures in place so that you can monitor mentions of your company and your brands. This ensures that you can stay on top of your reputation management and respond accordingly if necessary.
Google Alerts have been around for a while http://www.google.com/alerts and you can set up as many individual alerts as you like for any person, product, service etc. You can even monitor your competitors – it’s all free. Some of your alerts will return unrelated results and you simply cancel them if this is the case and refine the alert until you get the results you want. Make sure when you set the alerts up that you keep your phrase or words together otherwise you’ll get alerts for every single word in the phrase which can be very frustrating! For example if I was setting up an alert for Elite Edge Marketing, I would do it like this, “Elite+Edge+Marketing” – it takes a few seconds to set your alert up and you will receive an email asking you to verify your request. Upon verification you begin to receive updates.
Google Alerts send you an email as per the preferences you set to inform you of any mention of your chosen phrase(s) on the web. If you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client then you can also set up rules on how to deal with your alerts to save them taking over your inbox! I’ll be happy to explain more on this if you need me to – email Marie.
Another tool is Tweetbeep http://tweetbeep.com/ which allows you to keep track of conversations that mention you, your company, products/services etc on Twitter – again it’s free and you just have to go through the sign up process.
