3 Powerful Tools For Monitoring Your Brand

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

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

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.