Maintaining your reputation is an important endeavor, especially online. The viral nature of the Internet can lead to a whirlwind of discussion about your company in a very short time. Unfortunately, the discussions aren’t always in your favor.
With so much of the content published daily on the web, keeping tabs on your company, industry, and your competitors can seem like an exhausting task. But never fear; there are more resources available to help you stalk your scene than you count on a full set of fingers and toes.
Here’s a list of just some of the tools you need to stay on top of things and enter the conversation early on, before things get out of hand:
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can choose to receive daily, weekly, or “as it happens” updates whenever your topic is mentioned.
Yahoo! Pipes is a big, fat, wide-reaching net of social media searches to alert you every time your brand or product is mentioned by anybody on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.
Tweet Scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter. Tweet Scan indexes all public messages so you can find the conversations, people, and tweets you want. You can search by keyword or author with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.
