They’re labeled and called a variety of things: reputation management systems, brand tracking tools, social media search. Whatever, let’s keep it simple: a way to track your brand online.
The following tools are a collection of these type of tools.
What to track
Due to the variable choices of each of the tools listed in this post you may want to track a few choice items. Being alerted for every little keyword will overload you.
There are a few things you’ll probably want to monitor:
- YOUR NAME. This will help you keep track of whose talking about you. Not everyone references just your blog so its handy to track your name. You’ll also be able to monitor when people talk about you on sites like Twitter.
- BLOG URL/NAME. When someone mentions you on their blog or within social media you’ll want to know about it. Because people can say either good or bad things about you it’s best to keep track of your brand so you can join in on the conversation.
- NICHE KEYWORDS. This one is more to keep track of what other bloggers are talking about. It’s very helpful to keep track of your niche keywords so you can pop on over, leave a comment or see what all the buzz is about.
You may want to try out a variation of each such as “your brand” + “sucks” – cause who wants to be caught with more pages on why you suck than why you’re awesome, amiright?
The 5 Brand Tracking Tools
The following are the five tracking tools which will help you keep up to date with what people are saying about you, your blog and your brand.
Google Alerts
Starting out with the most simplest of tracking tools, Google Alerts allows you to place in keywords in which you receive an aggregated email of every other website talking about your keyword.
Chances are you already have a Google account so setup is quick and easy.
Quick guide to Google Alerts:
- Search terms: Fill in the keywords you wish to monitor
- Type: Set which type of media you’ll be monitoring
- How often: How often you’ll be sent an email
- Email length: So you’re not overwhelmed with information
- Your email: email address to send the report to
That’s just about it. Once you have Google Alerts setup you’ll be alerted with an email (based on your settings) which show you other blogs and people that are mentioning your keywords.
Blogpulse
Blogpulse is a fantastic tracking aggregator which keeps track of the hottest items on the web and allows you to monitor keywords.
There’s a few ways you can track your influence online:
- Basic: topic, keyword or URL
- Advanced: keywords, date range, results, etc
- Trend: see what’s trending based on keyword
- URL: track your blogs URL
Apparently Murlu is even being linked to from a German blog – hope they’re saying nice things about me!
Who knows, maybe the world is talking about your brand and you’ve yet to realize it.
Don’t try to over complicate the thing, just type in what you’d expect people would be talking about. Unless you want to spend hours digging through your log files of course.
WhosTalkin
Light weight and very thorough, WhosTalkin goes deep on the web:
- Blogs
- News
- Networks
- Videos
- Images
- Forums
- Tags
Some of the results can be a little skewed and overwhelming but nonetheless, WhosTalkin is an awesome tool to keep track of your brand. Just the ability to break down each category is worth it that way you don’t have to worry much about certain areas of the web and only focus on those which provide your best value.
SocialMention
Another free tool in tracking your brand, SocialMention also displays stats which show your strength, passion, reach and sentiment online.
Although it takes a few moments to get your results, SocialMention is fairly thorough with their search. What I particularly like about it is how it also displays top keywords and users which interact with your brand.
Using just these two pieces of information you could reach out to these people, build better relationships and figure out exactly what your brand conveys online.
Backtype
If you’ve typed in ‘brand tracking’ or keep up to date online you’ve probably heard of Backtype. It’s no secret, Backtype is awesome.
Right now it’s fairly basic and offering an option to join the private beta but the information displayed is priceless.
What I really like is the ability to see your reach on Twitter and the other Twitter users which have influence with retweets. You may not have caught it the first time but some of these users which happen to have retweeted your post helped send it all over the net – use Backtype to find these people, become friends and build that influence!
But really, how important is all this
It’s all arguable because in reality one has to wonder how important it is to track your brand online when you have work to do.
You could spend hours tracking instead of actually going out to create content, promote and connect with your actual users. It makes another thing to keep track of which may not be what you’re looking for at this moment.
Nonetheless, businesses can certainly take advantage of these tools along with web conscious website owners that want to see how their brand spreads online.
For the average blogger it’s really fun to see where your content spreads.
These tools can help you figure out what influences others so it can later be repeated – sending you more traffic, subscribers and spreading your influence online.
main image by ashley.adcox
technorati also offers some great features for tracking your brand online and once you add your blog then it will tell you where you are being talked about on the web, what blogs and also on what blog posts.
Hey Murray,
Nice Post. I only know about backtype and G alerts.
Many Tools are new to me. Going to check them out.
Thanks for sharing this great Post.
~Dev
Hope you can use em for good use Dev – you’d be surprise how far your blog and name can spread across the net haha.
Murray,
This is a fantastic post and awesome resource you have put together here mate!
Really impressed as I have not heard of ANY of them.
Checking out Blogpulse now because it appeals to the keyword lover in me. Is this tool blog specific? I will probably find out soon enough but would love to know how you use it specifically.
Thanks for a great resource. Tweeted, Dugg and Bookmarked
Blogpulse can go deeper with really any URL so it can also be great for niche and regular websites. Glad you found it helpful Alex – should be great to see how far your blog has spread; you’ll be surprised!
Now I know how you found out about my mention of you on my blog.
At least it was something good.
These are really some great tools Murray. They can actually help with niche keyword research besides branding. But you’ve taken it a step further and made it personal which takes blogging more on a professional note.
I haven’t heard of 2-4 but I’m itching to try them out. Thanks!
I’d love to hear how you plan to use them for niche research. I think it would be a great idea and method because you could use keywords and determine the buzz.
Thanks for your comments Thu; they’re always thoughtful and inspire me
I am always using Google Alert, thanks for sharing the other useful tools.
This was very helpful! I’ve only heard of #1 before. Backtype just helped me find 2 new people to follow.
That’s great to hear Jennifer, hope they turn out to be great people
Hey Murray,
I only knew about Google Alerts and backtype (not that I have really used either). This is a great list, and one that I will likely come back to every now and then as I surely won’t remember them all every week.
This one will be tweeted and dugg too!
Have a great day
Thanks for putting out socially Mark.
Let me know how the tools turn out for you, would love to hear what all you find with them.
Murray,
Nice topic, it’s important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. Your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. Excellent branding tools!
Thanks for the comment Justin.
While I have your attention: you do internet marketing and various methods to make money online. When you’re setting up your niche sites do you still go with your personal brand or are you setting up a new avatar for each site. Just wondering how doing the additional effort building a brand, even on niche sites, helps the bottomline.
I knew about Backtype quite a long time before. A few days ago I stumbled across SocialMention. Google Alerts Is also good. But the others I really did not know. Thanks for sharing them bro. It is really important to monitor our and our brands reputation online because sometimes many people may use it for wrong purposes
Thanks Shiva. I hope you find these helpful.
Damage control is equally important with online branding because there are those out there that want to tarnish and hurt your website. Like you said, when you keep track of your brand you can get right on top of these if it happens.
Wow! I only knew google alerts. Thanks for sharing it murlu. If you haven’t share this information, I haven’t knew that there are many useful tools out there to use.
- Blogging Access.com
Murray, I already have alerts set up on Google for the items you suggest, But I’ve not used the other sites you mention. Checking them out now.
Hi Murlu,
I have heard of 3 of them. I tend to use G Alerts the most when doing niche research, and finding EDU, and .GOV sites. I will take a closer look at the others you mentioned.
Louis
I have never heard about most of them. Google Alert is my friend now and happy with it. Thanks for listing out other tools, worth for a try!
Nice article Murlu. The only tool I am using at the moment is Google alerts but all of the others seem also like great tools to use.
To be honest though I haven’t really monitored my brand or blog that much. I am at the moment trying lots of other things out. How is everything going buddy?
Hi Murray,
The only tool that I knew before reading this post was Google Alerts.
I just checked out SocialMention, and I am impressed with it. Going to check out the other tools.
Interesting things one finds when they use some of these tools. Unfortunately, my results were rather what I expected. But on the plus side, at least I’ve yet to have a porn or other questionable site link to me
Great resources, thanks for sharing!
Hey Gurl,
You’re right, it’s better to just have normal results than bad ones. Maybe in the future you’ll see quite a bit more activity!
Murray,
Good stuff! You definitely added a couple of new tricks to my arsenal. appreciate it
Glad you enjoyed the extra resources Scott – it may add in an extra activity with your online presence but it can lead to really great things by finding the people that are talking about your brand, connecting with them and building a great network relationship which, of course, leads to many excellent things.
Nice collection of tools
intersting to see how results vary with who is looking at them.
I will be back to see what you are up to next!
Frieke Karlovits
It’s going to be really important for brands to track themselves online because as the saying goes: a happy customer tells three while an unhappy one tells a thousand. A lot will be damage control but the reward factor in businesses reaching out to people will be just as important.
Great collection of tools, Murray. I’ve used Google alerts for quite some time and set up some manual listening posts using rss search feeds. It’s interesting when you start looking into the data and seeing who is talking about you and where they’re from.
It may not be worth it to spend much time monitoring your brand as an average blogger, but if you own a business you want to know if there is negative information about your company. You want to fix the issue, and to become part of the ongoing conversation. These tools can help with this.
Thanks for sharing these tools with us.
We do a bit of tracking at work which has been helpful with engaging our customers. We’ve found, a few times, that people will talk about our products on a forum – sometimes good or bad – so what we’ll do is join up and either thank them or answer those questions of concerns from other members. We may even take the opportunity to personally contact these people and engage with them over the phone or through email – this leads to a great relationship down the line because it’s that “extra step” that sets a lot of companies apart.
The little things really do count even if they don’t seem like it up-front. Monitoring can greatly help to uncover these opportunities
These are all fantastic. I Am having trouble getting a few to work but the rest are pretty solid. I use Socialmention daily for a few clients and it picks things up very quickly. The export ability (and FREE) is a great tool.