Monitoring the Internet using Google alerts
I have said this many times before - but the ‘new’ social Internet has a real risk that a publicity nightmare could blow up in blogs, forums, or review sites without your knowledge of it. I have stressed that businesses should be monitoring the greater social Internet for all mentions of their business.
Of course the best method I promote is subscription to our Xefeed product, which scans the Internet in it’s entirety including many of the social media sites such as Flickr (for images) and You Tube (for videos) as well as the blogoshpere for mention of your business itself or it’s products or services. This information is then repackaged and sent automatically to you - it can be published automatically on your website - or bad news can be separately highlighted to management or marketing to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
For those not ready to take the leap into a full monthly subscription then at the very minimum you should have Google alerts coming into your email box at least weekly if not daily. Firstly, if you don’t have one already set up, then set up a Google account. From your account page select “Alerts” - in the right hand “My Services” menu. From there you can create an alert based on search terms (your company name, your own name, or even the most searched term for your business); you can select to receive the emails alerts for any amount of time from as they come up (i.e. as Google finds the term on a particular page) to daily, weekly or monthly. Google will send you an email notifying you of all the ‘new’ appearances of your search terms or activity in your search terms both on web pages and within blogs.
It is not completely accurate and you will find that you receive a lot of notifications that don’t relate to you in anyway (I get notified every time Julia Roberts gets mentioned somewhere on the web) but it is a great start and for anyone serious about business and the social Internet it is an essential tool. That is, if you are not all signed up for our wicked Xefeed product!