Online Monitoring of Industries, Competitors, and Yourself

Source: Golden Practices

Following are excerpts from a recent blog posting by Michelle Golden, president of Golden Marketing Inc., which helps professional service firms, lawyers, CPAs and financial advisors with their practice management, development and marketing.

The three top tools to monitor are:

1. Google Alerts
2. Bloglines (run a search for your key term, then “subscribe” to it)
3. Twitter Search

Google Alerts sends you emails containing excerpts and links to any new web pages containing the search terms you set up with them. You can manage your search very easily.

Bloglines is a great and easy to use blog aggregator with powerful search capabilities. Any search term at all can be “subscribed to” so that all future blog posts containing your term will pull into your Bloglines feeds.

Twitter is a microblogging tool that is literally exploding. Microblogging means that when posts are made, they are 140 characters or less. There is a LOT of commentary about companies on Twitter. You can bookmark your search so you don’t have to reenter search terms again next time. You can also receive email notification of search results much like Google Alerts.

ACTING ON MENTIONS

Regardless of where you find mentions about your company, there are, in the elegantly short words of Guy Kawasaki (in a post about how to use Twitter), some actions you should take:

• People are pissed: help them out
• People are confused: help them out
• People who have questions: help them out
• People are happy: ask them to spread the word

To read the complete post, click here.

From Golden Practices, http://goldenmarketing.typepad.com/weblog/.