Look who’s talking: Monitoring buzz on the web

As a freelance community builder and co-director of TheWerks web-socialite Rosie Sherry offers advice on monitoring your brand and filtering out the noise.

Five sites for monitoring your brand online

There’s no denying that the web holds huge amount of information. Most of it irrelevant to you or I, however getting quick access to relevant information is invaluable for you, your business and your brand. Whether you want to monitor mentions of your name, track your competitors or do market research there are plenty of social media monitoring sites than can help.

Read on for five simple tools for dealing with the data deluge…

What information you make use of?

The most obvious thing you may want to track is your brand. This could be your name, your product(s) or you company name.

Though there could be numerous other pieces of data that may be of great use, for example:

• your competition
• your local area
• your personal interests and passions

Top five tools for monitoring web based information

Google Analytics

Stick a bit of code within your website or blog to track useful information such as keywords being searched on by users to arrive on your site, traffic data and sites that are successfully linking to you.

Tweetbeep

Whether you tweet or not. Tweetbeep is the easiest way to get notifications on keywords straight to your inbox.

Addictomatic

Get a one page result of your specific topic from around the web. For example, you can out find a lot about me.

HowSociable

Similar to Addictomatic, however results are displayed differently using a scoring method. It also has the advantage of being able to track your results by email.

Google Alerts

From the ever growing empire, Google Alerts brings you updates straight to your inbox.

Custom apps

If you have the time or budget a custom solution may be worth your while. Or perhaps someone has already built something out there. It’s always worth a look. Twistori and We All Hate Quickbooks are good examples.

What action can you take?

Well, it depends on the situation and whilst a guide of what to do in each scenario is good, each response should be individual in their nature. No one wants to communicate with an automated robot human being.

So if:

• someone blogs positively about you. Perhaps leave a comment or drop a friendly email.
• there is positive press. Why not write about it from your own website, blog or twitter account.
• someone tweets about you why not get in touch, respond to them or follow them back.
• there is negative feedback tread cautiously. Quite often it is best to take a step back, mull on it for a while or get a second opinion on what action to take. Wars on the web are not good and are best avoided if possible.

Remember, everything on the web is permanent.

Rosie Sherry keeps herself busy building a coworking community at The Werks and making lovely social-ness on the web.

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Related:

Social Networking

• Do you follow? Freelance Advice on Twitter
• Find us on Facebook – for freelance advice and networking

Winning New Business

• Personal Branding for freelancers
• Staying in touch in the midst of mayhem

 

Illustrations: Gary Hayes and Matt Hamm