Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

3 Powerful Tools For Monitoring Your Brand

February 16, 2009 | Feature, Marketing

Personal branding is very important for bloggers and you’re going to see a lot of talk about it this year. I have talked about the importance of branding before. However, how do you monitor it? Here are a few online tools to help you do it.

The idea here is to constantly have your little tentacles out so that you know whenever somebody mentions you or your site. That way, you can see what they said and respond appropriately. They will be highly impressed with you if you respond every time your name is mentioned. They’ll think you are some kind of magic worker – that you’re EVERYWHERE and see everything. In reality, you’re just using some cool tools to monitor everything for you.

Google Alerts

Picture 3 If you’re not aware of Google Alerts already, it is about time you were. And if you’re not using it, start right now. It is a way to be emailed automatically whenever somebody posts something using search terms which you specify. Most typical is the “vanity search”.

Set up a search alert for your own name and/or the name of your website. Choose “Comprehensive” so that multiple alerts can be combined into the same email. Specify how often you want to be notified and where to send it.

In my case, any time somebody mentions “David Risley” on a website, I’ll be notified of it regardless of whether they link to my blog or not.

You can use Google Alerts to do a lot more than brand monitoring. Also, you can subscribe to any alert stream you set up as an RSS feed if you want to see your alerts in your news reader.

Twitter Alerts

Picture 4 There is a LOT happening on Twitter and you need to monitor it. Sure, you can run searches via the Twitter Search but that can be tedious. We want automatic. So, two services I like are TweetLater and TweetBeep. Both are essentially Google Alerts for Twitter.

TweetLater is the one I actually use. They do a lot more than just alerts, including scheduled tweets, auto-follow, auto-DM, and a bunch of other automation tools. But, the only one I use is the alerts. I enter the search keywords I want to monitor and tell TweetLater when to email me. Every day, I get an email digest of all mentions of my search terns across Twitter.

You want to use something like this. Twitter is so real-time that you need something specifically for Twitter to get notified properly.

Comment Alerts

People are making comments all over the Internet. Blog comments, Facebook posts, other social media comments. How are you going to monitor all of it? The answer is Backtype.

Backtype aggregates all of your comments in one place in your Backtype profile. It does this by having you enter your web URLs and Backtype uses this to match any blog comments you make (based on your URL) to you. You also enter your usernames for sites like Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, etc. If you click on Alerts in your Backtype profile, though, you will see all comments where your name is mentioned (or any search term you specify).

So, using Google, Twitter and Backtype, you will pretty much have the Internet covered. You can effectively monitor your brand and respond appropriately.

Do you have any other recommendations for David Risley dot com readers? Please post them to comments.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

  1. Google Free Tools Keep Getting Better
  2. Tools
  3. How to Get a Brand New Blog Off The Ground [Traffic]
  4. The Key To Launching A Brand New Blog
  5. 4 Powerful Time Management Tactics For Overworked Bloggers

Learn The Real Story On Blogging As a Business...

  • Get immediate FREE access to the Six Figure Blogger Blueprint
  • Get exclusive stuff NOT available on this blog.
  • Get the latest updates from the weird Risley man who runs this site.

Enter email:

  • Google is turning out more and more great stuff sometimes I just can't keep up but thanks for keeping me up to date.
    A good tip for other bloggers is when you post on other people's blogs as comments don't just add a website but add the link to your profile page.
  • David,
    I second you notion of monitoring your brand. My wife and I averted disaster about a year ago. She runs a translating service out of our home. She declined to take a job, and that person decided to slam her on a forum run by a local business owner. Luckily we have a google alert for her business name. It popped up, and she was able to go respond very quickly and put the matter to bed. Great post, and something that isn't talked about nearly enough.
    Thanks,
    Jason
  • I have been using google alert only, backtype sounds really cool, backtype also can be sued to monitor your competitors activity.
  • Didn't know about Twitter alerts. Thanks for sharing.
  • I'm in process of making a switch from Google Alerts to Filterbox.com - not connected to them at all - just really dig the service.
  • Useful tips. Brand monitoring is thing must be done.
  • Love it! Already paying off and have incorporated it into other ventures.
  • How I am very thankful that I fond an article like this.
  • Good post...

    I know of google alerts and use it already...Thanks for the twitter thing and also the backtype

    I always wonder how you guys gets all these things..:)
  • Hi David,

    I like the tools you mentioned. I also tried Sasha Kovaliov's method of putting all th alerts into Yahoo pies and that works well too :)

    Thanks,

    Shashi
  • what about tracking any video and photo updates?? is there any service for that??
  • Everything is fine, except Google Alerts - they simply suck. It's better to play with google search and google blog search and put it all into yahoo! pipes - that would make it useful :)
  • Thanks for including us, David.

    I definitely agree that using these three tools alone, you can keep on top of your brand. At BackType, we use these three as well as FriendFeed search.
  • David,

    I'm an old guy trying to learn new tricks. Recently started a website and blog. You've given me a wealth of valuable information.

    Just subscribed to your RSS feed.

    Thanks very much
  • Toni
    I am no expert but I have found Feedly to be a great resource for aggregating all conversations (video, blogs, articles, tweets etc). Do you have any insight that you can share re: Feedly, good or bad?
  • While I've seen Google Alerts used for this and have used TweetLater for one of my projects I've only recently stumbled across Backtype. I completely agree that it's 100% easier to keep track of comments from... just about any blog setup when you using it. It used to be quite a bit more painful to keep track of them all and this is a huge timeserver for anyone who comments a lot.
blog comments powered by Disqus