Google Alerts are an invaluable way to keep tabs of mentions of your own name, your company name, industry news, competitors, and many other useful bits of information. Google Alerts may be found here: http://www.google.com/alerts You need to first sign in with a Google account, then just insert the keywords that you want to research.
This is important (and easy!) to do because if someone is talking about you or your company in a blog posting or forum – you want to know about it in a timely manner!
A while back I googled someone’s name because I wanted to call them and didn’t feel like going through my stack of my business cards. I just thought I would enter this person’s name into the search engines and I couldn’t believe what came up in the search engine page. This person had a small website which had not been updated in a while which appeared lower on the page, and a scathing report had been filed on Ripoffreport.com – it was listed first on the search engine page for this person’s name. Ripoffreport has a page rank of 8 – a high page rank and it is very difficult to get that kind of posting buried in the search engines. Believe me, you definitely don’t want a posting on Rip Off Report to show up first as the first result in a search engine.
People in general are increasingly turning to the web for their information. I have used the web to find reviews of products, services, and travel destinations. Every person and their business name can be kept up to date as to what people are saying about them on the web so that they are not surprised when they one day google their name.
What to do if you find yourself with a scathing review on a high page ranked website? You need to blanket the web with video postings, podcasts, press releases, articles, blog postings, forum postings, blog comments and ping everything so that your positive spin unequivocally shows that you are seen as the expert in your field – or at the very least – a decent human being.
Be sure to sign up for your Google Alerts and keep it updated with new terms as you see fit. If it gets too annoying, you can always receive the information on a weekly basis. Just make sure that you do it!