With the explosion of Consumer Generated Media (CGM), ongoing monitoring of your personal or professional reputation has become a must. Consumer Generated Media consists largely of social networking websites; blogs; photo, audio and video sharing sites; discussion boards; and any other website that allows users to share their experience, opinion and knowledge.Facebook, Twitter, BlogSpot, WordPress... people update and write about anything, anywhere, anytime.
In fact, they might be writing about you. You can imagine the devastating ramifications of negative word of mouth about your company or yourself. However, you can be proactive and monitor online reputations before disaster strikes.
You can monitor your name, product feedback, services, company, competitors, employers, even enemies. The sky is the limit and the tools are easy to set up and free to use, so take advantage of them.
Here are five free basic tools to monitor one's online reputation:
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a powerful content monitoring service. It's a great way to stay informed. Google Alerts monitor both social and traditional media. You will receive email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your search term.
If your Web search query contains two or more words, use quotation marks around your phrase to tell Google Alerts exactly what to retrieve. For instance, a Google Alert for "online reputation software" works better with quotes. Here's a great trick: use negative keywords. If your name is similar (or the same) to another organisation or another person, use the search phrase "your name - characteristic of the other company/person" as an alert.
Using the negative keyword, Google Alerts will exclude almost all results about the second one. Let's say that my name is John Smith and I am a Human Resources Manager but Johnsmithsport.com is the corporate website of a Spanish designer. The search phrase "John Smith -johnsmithsport.com" will eliminate results related to his website from my alert. The Google Alerts service has several other settings to help you customise your updates.
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