Your Most Important Reputation Management Tool
Reputation management is becoming more and more important every day. But there is more to reputation management than simply influencing search results for the positive while knocking down the negative results. Many online marketers who find themselves thinking about reputation management do so as a reaction to search results they do not like.
True reputation management begins with reputation monitoring. After all, you can’t influence or combat what you don’t see. It’s important to know who is talking about you and what they are saying. That’s where the reputation monitoring comes in.
Your most important reputation monitoring tool – and reputation management too – is Google Alerts. Google Alerts will notify you whenever anyone is talking about you. You simply sign up, enter the keywords you want to monitor, and every time that keyword is detected by Google you’ll get an e-mail alert. To make it work for you in reputation management, just use your brand name as the keyword you want to monitor.
All good reputation management begins with reputation monitoring and Google Alerts is the most important tool you have. It’s free.
A Simple Tool For Keeping Track Of Competitors
Spying on competitors is not that hard. There are some simple tools that make it a little easier, but I’d go beyond just the basics and really put emphasis on competitive intelligence. Nevertheless, one of the most basic tools for spying on your competitors is Google Alerts.
Just as you monitor your own name brands and important keywords, you should monitor your competitors’ brands as well. This does a few things for your competitive intelligence strategy:
- Any time anyone mentions your competition, you know about it and can gauge the context more easily.
- Whenever your competition updates their website or blog you are notified
- You keep tabs of important social media where your competition is active
- If your competition adds new products or services then you will be one of the first to know about it when it is announced publicly
But understand that Google Alerts won’t tell you everything. It will only keep you notified of public comments made by or about your competition, not what they are talking about in their board meetings. Still, it’s an important place to start.