How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?
How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.
She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?
Well, the secret here is to go to "Google alerts." Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.
It's really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.
So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I'll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a Comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that gets emailed to you once a week.
Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don't have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And this sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.
So, let's create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here's my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.
Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don't. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, "the complete website" those three words need to be in order, "the complete website" for Google to actually post an alert.
Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word "the" the word "complete, " and the word "website" randomly streamed throughout it. And that's not helpful to me.
So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it's interesting for me to read what's going on in "Facebook" and "My Space", and "You Tube" and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.
But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, and start the information flow and you can always go back here and edit the way the information get send to you.
That's how you stay on top of what people are saying about your business and that's it for today.
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