One of the things that everyone should be doing is monitoring their personal presence online. Regardless of whether you are on-line or not, but if you’re reading this, you’re online.
Did you see that?
Depending on what you do you should also consider monitoring your agency or organizations presence as well, or at the very least, ensure that someone in your workplace is doing it.
The basic of monitoring is to allow for awareness of what is being said about you, your organization or agency and knowing where it is being said. The importance for this is obvious… knowing who is saying what, where it’s being said and in what context to better manage your reputation.
If you don’t care, then you can stop reading.
There are many tools available to monitor your presence. There is no way I can describe all of them, so I will highlight a few and let you explore the rest.
Google Alerts: This is a must. Google is the information holder and scanner of the web, so it is only natural that this is a must do. You can set up your search criteria and choose several options for how and when you want to be notified of any mentions of your searches. Bonus, add google reader to your tools. (free)
SocialMention: Great tool for seeing what is being said across a wide variety of platforms. Enter what you are searching for and you can direct it to look at one or multiple platforms. (free)
Hootsuite / Tweetdeck: Fantastic one stop shop for monitoring keywords, lists, IDs in a format that puts columns at your finger tips. (free)
Twitter: Connect – Interactions, mentions, #Discover are all great for knowing what is happening with your presence. Great for being able to respond and monitor in Twitter. search.twitter.com is excellent and underused. Check out the advanced settings. (free)
Facebook: Notifications are essential to know what is being said with you or about you. Under the ‘Account Settings’ tab click on notifications to see how much information you can be notified of. Never overlook your timeline or news feed either. It’s good to know what your friends and people you have subscribed to are talking about.
RSS Feeds: They aren’t just for having blog post updates sent to you. They can be used to get all sorts of information aggregated to your choice of viewers. I have multiple RSS feeds go to Google Reader and directly to my email. (free)
Professional Services: Radian6, Sysomos, Tellegance (watch for this one…not publicly live yet), Jugnoo, Argyle are all power houses for monitoring and interacting. ($$$$)
Hope this helps. Have any good ones that I didn’t mention here? Feel free to let everyone know in the comments.
Tim, good post.
Google Alerts is the most under used tool I know. It is also free and the most versatile.
In terms of monitoring Twitter streams one thing you can also do is monitor #hashtags. Currently I have multiple feeds running in Hootsuite.
Rss feeds and Google reader are a great combination. It is the only way I read other blogs as I read well over a hundred on a weekly basis
I agree watching Facebook notifications helps as well.
The more that you spend learning what is said about any situation will determine how you react. Remember more knowledge also helps understand any given situation and more and more people are flocking to the social media space when crises break out.
Thanks for sharing:)
Thanks Rob.
Great point about hashtags for monitoring as well. Surprisingly, I have caught a couple of mentions of name used in hashtags.
I have to thank you for the efforts you’ve put in penning this blog. I really hope to view the same high-grade content from you later on as well. In fact, your creative writing abilities has encouraged me to get my own, personal website now 😉