How to Monitor What People Say About You

There are so many web sites and blogs and forums and social networks out there that it’s just plain hard to keep track of everything that’s being said about your business. You can try to keep up, but after a while it just gets overwhelming. Before you know it, your RSS reader has 1000 unread messages. Who has time to slog through all of that information just to see if someone’s talking about you?

Here are a few easy ways to monitor what’s being said about you online.

1. Monitor your business name on Twitter.
Now that Twitter’s search is up and running, it is really easy to watch for any mentions of your company name. In the search bar, type the term you want. For instance, I typed Bizzia. Once that result comes up, I can subscribe to the RSS feed for that query. And anytime someone mentions Bizzia, I can see it in my reader.

2. Subscribe to Google news alerts.
I use this one a lot. I have alerts set up that mention my web site name and url. That lets me see who’s linking to me or talking about my site. Additionally, I can see if someone is aggregating or stealing my site content. You can also use it to keep track of what’s going on in your industry, or even who’s talking about your competitors. I subscribe via email, but you can also use RSS to track items.

3. Watch blogs using Google blog search.
You might get a few duplicates from Google news if you tell it to search blogs, but sometimes you’ll get links here for blogs that you won’t get with news. You can exclude blogs from news and just use the blog search to keep track of what bloggers are saying about your company or product. If you’re lucky, you’ll find happy customers who mention you by name. If not, you have a chance to address concerns and turn an unhappy customer into a happy one.

4. Search Technorati.
You can use Technorati to search for mentions of your business, or you can create a ‘watchlist‘ using keywords or your company name. You can also see who’s linking to your web site and what they’re saying about you.

There are many other ways to keep track of who’s mentioning you online, but these are some of the easiest to set up and monitor. If you have something set up that you can’t live without, we’d love to hear about it. How do you keep track of conversations that can affect your business?

image: stock.xchng