When you have an online presence there becomes a need to manage your online reputation - actually let's revise that: even if you don't have an online presence people will be talking about you and your business online. However, it is impossible to constantly search the web for comments about you and your business, so generally a little help from three great online reputation management tools...
The first is Google Alerts. Google alerts is easy to setup - just go to the website, and login or register with Google if you don't already have an account. Then in the "Search term" field simply type the term you want to monitor. For example, a few of the things we typically are all of our website names. After setting this up, you get email alerts each time Google finds a website using that term.
The second tool is for monitoring what is said about you in Twitter. It's called Topsy. Twitter being Twitter it's hard to find everything that is said about you so Topsy makes that easy. Topsy is also easy to use - just go to the website and enter the following:
site:[your website address]
e.g. site:glasscommunity.com
You can also use it like a normal search engine e.g. just type your name to see who has 'tweeted' about you or your business.
The final tool is Social Mention. This tool is quite interesting because it aggregates information from a number of sources and then gives you information on how you rank. For example, for "Wirth Consulting" it gives our business a 11% passion rank - this is the likelihood that individuals talking about our business do so repeatedly.
However there is one problem with Social Mention. It can't determine between individuals or individual entities. For example, if we search on a person's name it aggregates all people over the world with that name, believing they are all the same person. However, it is good for your company name or product name if it is unique.
Like Topsy, Social Mention is just like using a search engine. Type in the company/person/product name and hit Search. Use inverted commas to get exact matched results (i.e. "glass community" instead of glass community).
