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. -
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. -
BoardReader
Monitor conversations on message boards with BoardReader. As an added bonus, it also tracks Twitter. -
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. -
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.
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9:22AM on 3rd October 2008
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.
SEO at Cheapflights Media
11:58AM on 3rd October 2008
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.
SEO at Cheapflights Media
11:59AM on 3rd October 2008
Would probably help if I posted the link:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose
2:46PM on 3rd October 2008
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!
Director of Product Development at Econsultancy
3:08PM on 3rd October 2008
...and if you're happy to pay a little I hear Andy's 'Trackur' is very good ; )
http://www.trackur.com/
Founder at Optimics (www.optimics.cz)
3:53PM on 7th October 2008
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?