How To Keep An Eyeball On Yourself, Your Clients, Your Competitors, Your Friends, Your Enemies… Well, You Get The Idea.
There are companies that charge hundreds, even thousands of dollars to monitor what’s said about you, your company or your brand on the internet, so called internet monitoring or web monitoring.
Let’s start with these two absolutes.
a. Keeping track of what is being said about you, your brand or company can be a make or break proposition. On the positive side, not knowing what’s being said can be a valuable missed opportunity. On the negative side, it can be a cancerous tumor that grows unseen, its existence unknown, until it’s too late to do anything about it.
b. Keeping up on what your competitors are doing and what’s being said about them is just as important.
So how to DIY?
Let me count the ways.
1. Google Alerts http://Google.com/Alerts
I’ve found this to be the most effective of all the ways to keep track of anything and everything. It will notify you of relevant information posted in news, blogs, the web, video and groups. So when you pick the type of Google Alert you want pick COMPREHENSIVE.
One good piece of advice. The more specific you get about the alert the better. One method is to put the alert in quotes, such as “Acme Database Systems.”
If you don’t put the alert in quotes you’ll get every piece of information about not only Acme Database Systems but dozens of URLs related to database systems in general.
You can also set the frequency of your alert to as-it-happens, once a day or once a week.
If you’re only going to do one, Google Alerts should be it. But wait, there’s more.
2. Yahoo Alerts http://Alerts.Yahoo.com
Amber/Missing Children
Avatars
Breaking News
Fantasy Sports
Farechase India
Feed / Blog
Games
Health News
Horoscope
HotJobs
Local News
Mail
Market Summary
Movie Recommendations
News
Snowfall
Sports
Instant real-time updates.
Breaking news, stock value increases or decreases, airline flight deals and more are available via Yahoo! Alerts.
Track any type of web content.
Get an alert whenever new content is available on your favorite blog or website.
You choose how you get your alert.
Alerts can be sent via email, Yahoo! Messenger, or your mobile device.
The only downside to Yahoo Alerts is they don’t have a COMPREHENSIVE alert like Google so you have to set each category individually.
Again, I suggest putting you alert in quotes (“Acme Database Systems”) to avoid unwanted alerts.
3. Google Blog Search http://Blogsearch.Google.com and Technorati Blog Search http://Technorati.com/search
If you want to know what those influential and sometimes malicious (yes, there are malicious people lurking on the world wild web) bloggers are saying, use these two search engines.
What to do when you find them?? How to capitalize? Play defense if need be?
We’ll examine that in a future blog post.
4. Yotify http://Yotify.com
If you’ve heard of Yotify you’re truly on top of things. Yotify’s concept is to send out what they call “scouts” to search for information in numerous areas including new & blogs, classified sites, shopping sites, YouTube, eBay, Linked In and more.
Go to the site, look around, send out some scouts and see if this site isn’t a great tool for your internet monitoring toolbox.
As with Yahoo, there is no COMPREHENSIVE search but setting up individual searches is well worth your time and effort.
5. Tweet Beep http://TweetBeep.com
The latest entrant into the mix is Tweet Beep. Tweet Beep describes itself as Google Alerts for Twitter. Here’s what they say they can do.
(Reprinted from the Tweet Beep website) “If you love Twitter, you’ll love TweetBeep! Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com).
Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more!”
6. Newsletter/Email subscriptions
One of the simplest ways to keep up with your competitors, vendors and the like is to let them tell you themselves.
These days most every company has a blog, a newsletter or a social network.
So join up and let them (as they used to say in 50’s detective movies) “spill their guts!”
7. USPTO – http://www.uspto.gov
Not a source you’d use every day but let’s say you thing you’ve got the next greatest idea for a product name or business. You might want to check and see if it’s already in use. It’s easy. Go to the United States Patent & Trademark Office website.
Click on TRADEMARKS then click on Search Trademark Database (TESS). Finally click on NEW USER FORM SEARCH and off you go. If you’re searching for a product or business name the FIELD you want to search is Combined Word Mark. If you’re searching for competitors and any recent/past trademark filings, just enter the person or company and use the Owner Name & Address FIELD.
Might seem a little complicated at first but it’ll be easy once you get the hang of it. AND you can impress your friends by knowing what shows say TIME WARNER will be debuting before they’re announced. Just enter TIME WARNER in the search term area and owner name & address for the FIELD.
Soon I’ll be doing a post about registering a trademark by yourself. It’s relatively simple and only costs you about $300 bucks.
Monitoring can be fun. Especially if you have a little bit of the voyeur in you, or you’re into spy cams, or you’re a bit of a gossip.
The bottom line is the more information you have, the more successful your PR and marketing efforts will be!
Tags: Brand Monitoring, Internet Monitoring, Internet Monitoring Tool, Marketing, Monitoring Internet Activity, PR, Pragmatic Marketing, Public Relations, reputation monitoring, social media, Viral Marketing, Web Monitoring
