Online reputation monitoring is a growing market and there are a number of companies offering such solutions.
Yet some are overkill for most businesses and many firms simply can't justify the costs.
For those that want to keep track of what (if anything) others are saying about them online but have a limited budget, here are some tools for brand monitoring on the cheap:
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Google Blog Search
Google Blog Search is a lot like Google News but is focused on blogs. It also offers notifications so that you can be alerted to mentions in the blogosphere.
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Technorati
Technorati tracks millions of blog posts and in addition to Google Blog Search is a great way to monitor what's being said about your business in the blogosphere.
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BoardReader
Monitor conversations on message boards with BoardReader. As an added bonus, it also tracks Twitter.
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Google News
Google News tracks thousands of news sources and is a good way to monitor any press mentions. Set up some Google News alerts for your business and automatically receive notification when you're mentioned.
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FriendFeed
FriendFeed can be a good way to see what . Even though it's not a tracking service per se, it does enable you to see if people are sharing content (news stories, blog posts, etc.) that revolves around your business.
While online reputation monitoring services can be extremely valuable to certain types of businesses, for most businesses, freely-available tools like the ones here can give you the ability to monitor your online reputation easily and with little cost.
Posted 03 October 2008 07:40am by Patrick Oak with 6 comments
Tags: Google, Search, Blogs and Blogging, Aggregation
Topics: Online PR & Social Media
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Graham Charlton
Online Advertising
3 October 2008 09:22AM
The free services are getting better and better - the one I'd include on this list which is pretty decent for a snapshot is addictomatic, complete with friendly robot.
If you're slightly techy then Yahoo Pipes is worth a tinker with. And blogpulse has a handy compare and contrast section too.
But with all of these services (and, indeed all the paid ones too), as well as the algorithm-based analysis, nothing beats someone who knows the business, the sector, and the blogosphere sitting down and spending time analysing the results to sift out what really is important, and what isn't.
Head of Search at Propellernet
3 October 2008 11:58AM
I'll second Chris's suggestions.
The Social Media Firehose uses Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate keyword based feeds from some of the services listed above plus a few others, and is pretty straight forward to use.
A time saver over setting up feeds individually.
Head of Search at Propellernet
3 October 2008 11:59AM
Would probably help if I posted the link:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose
3 October 2008 14:46PM
Great list to kick things off. If you'd like about 20 more free tools, click "Andy Beal" and you'll see my list of 26 free tools.
Cheers!
Editor in Chief at Econsultancy
3 October 2008 15:08PM
...and if you're happy to pay a little I hear Andy's 'Trackur' is very good ; )
http://www.trackur.com/
Direct Pojistovna a.s.
7 October 2008 15:53PM
Okay, now imagine you work for a start-up with a moderate brand awareness in a tiny country such as the Czech Republic. The conversations are out there but your online reputation monitoring options are very limited, pretty much by your free time... None of the free tools seem to be of any use.
Anyone?