Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These alerts are sent to a Twitter account, and have generated a good list of followers. The auto-twitter page for this account on AlertRank shows you the different ways you can control which alerts are tweeted.

1. Add a hashtag to the end of each tweet to help people find it with a Twitter search tool. You can add as much text as you want here, and AlertRank will automatically trim the alert to make sure the total tweet is within 140 characters.
2. Use the AlertRank quality score to control the importance of the alerts you tweet. The AlertRank score is based on Google PageRank and a collection of other influence factors. The higher the AlertRank, the more influential the source of the alert is.
3. Select the search terms to include in your tweets. You can collect alerts from up to 1,000 search terms in a single AlertRank account, but you can limit the tweets to just the terms you want.
4. Restrict tweets to those alerts with the right page features. For example, if you want to only tweet alerts that allows comments or trackbacks, you can set these options on. That gives you a set of tweets that are suited for a blog outreach campaign.
5. Depending on the amount of alerts you get in your account, you can restrict the number of tweets to a maximum per hour and per day.

The best part is that all of this tweeting is automatic. Since the accounts on AlertRank are free, you can create multiple accounts, each with their own search terms and levels of auto-tweeting control.

When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I used the default avatar, used an account name that explained the purpose, followed nobody from this account, and stated in the bio that the tweets were automatic. I’m sure that if I had adopted a persona by using the name and picture of a real person, the number of followers would have been much greater.

So what is the value of this experiment? It shows that by simply auto-tweeting about a specific subject you can attract followers interested in learning more. 1,570 followers may not seem like much compared to the millions promised by the various pyramid schemes being promoted, but these followers are all self-selected. They want to learn more about this topic. It is the ultimate opt-in lead list. The pyramid schemes are all based on the existence of auto-follow bots on many accounts. If you follow millions of people, a high percentage will auto-follow back, but what is the value of this completely non-qualified list? Bulk growth of Twitter accounts is so early 2009. The real key to Twitter marketing with be opt-in lists like this one.

If you use this technique, you can grow a list of engaged followers, and then add whatever messages you want to the account. It isn’t spam, because everyone on the list asked to be there. Let’s say you are a band that wants to build a list of followers interested in your type of music. Just auto-tweet the appropriate alerts, and then add offers for your CDs at regular intervals. The same idea can be applied to all types of ecommerce.

I told AlertRank to autotweet all the alerts that were about the restaurant, or Boston and Harvard Square. I excluded the alerts about competitors. I also asked for hashtags #harvardsquare and #boston to be added to all the tweets.

The tweets are now appearing, and they are an interesting mix of local news and mentions of the restaurant. It is still early, but I think this will be an effective example of how an automatic Twitter account can create a sense of location-specific buzz for a restaurant.

It looks like antitrust has been getting a lot of activity. The average AlertRank for antitrust results is also high, which means that influential sources are writing about it. Let’s look more closely at what they are saying. Clicking the row for antitrust brings up just the alerts for that search term.

There is one alert that catches my eye right away. It is a U.S. News & World Report story with the headline: “Obama’s New Antitrust Rules Have Big, Powerful Companies Sweating”. Big, powerful companies that are sweating about DOJ action make eager clients. This story would be a great opportunity for an FYI letter to some clients.

Scanning through these alerts shows that antitrust action against Google is gaining a lot of buzz. We can isolate these items by searching for Google within the antitrust alerts.

These look like a great subject for a blog post. A round-up of current stories on the subject, with some opinions added on how a big, sweaty company could handle such an investigation would be interesting to lots of people. To make it easier for the person who has to write that post, I can print these alerts out as a PDF report, by clicking the PDF button on the top right of the page. The links to each original story will be kept in the PDF to make it easy to collect them for the post.

Once this blog post is created, it can be used in comments on some of the highest ranked alerts on this topic. A comment with a link back to a blog post is a great way to build up higher search engine ranking, which is something Ropes & Gray could benefit from. A search for antitrust law firm, shows that Ropes & Gray isn’t even in the top 100 results. Their competitor, Covington & Burling, is. Seems like Ropes & Gray needs to pay attention to their online marketing and SEO efforts.

As an example, a real estate lead may be interested in home listings for a specific area. He could be sent an introductory message, then be placed on an automated e-mail drip campaign where updated home listings are sent to him on a weekly basis.

E-mail drip marketing can be an extremely effective way to brand a business to big ticket leads that may still be in “research mode” for weeks if not months.A lead may be more inclined to do business with a company whose email drip marketing campaign is effective, meaning that the company has sent him helpful information throughout the research period.

All you have to do is create Google Alerts that will generate stories your leads will find useful, select the best one every few days, and email it to your leads as an FYI email. It is a great way of staying in front of them without asking for the order right away. You are a great resource, and your information is always so useful. This will build the trust you need when you do try to close.

You can create a social media version of drip marketing with automatic Twitter delivery of Google Alerts using AlertRank. You can tell AlertRank to post a couple of Google Alerts a day to your Twitter account, and then send an email to your leads telling them you have a free information resource set up for them on Twitter. In between the automated tweets of Google Alerts you can tweet additional messages by hand about specials, discounts, etc. The best part is that Twitter searches for the keywords you are auto-tweeting about will bring in new leads as followers.

Firm’s name
“first boston realty”

Firm’s website
site:firstbostonrealty.com
Find out when Google has indexed a new page on the site.

link:firstbostonrealty.com -site:firstbostonrealty.com
View all inbound links

Competitor
“warren residential group”
site:warrenre.com
link:warrenre.com -site:warrenre.com

Specialty areas
boston (”luxury apartment” OR “luxury condo”)

Properties
boston (”one charles” OR “battery wharf” OR “rowes wharf”)

Area news for clients
“boston school”
boston (crime OR rape OR murder OR shooting)

Government agencies
“real estate” OR “condo” OR “apartment” site:cityofboston.gov
site:bostonpublicschools.org

Industry background and leads
“boston real estate” ( attorney OR lawyer OR “law firm”)
“boston real estate” (development OR construction OR “breaking ground”)
(”boston condo” OR “boston real estate”) zoning
boston apartment rentals
boston condo
boston condo sales
boston mortgage
boston property management
boston real estate
boston real estate tax

Here is the account now in AlertRank. It’s been running for about 24 hours, so there still aren’t that many results, but they’ll start filling in quickly.

You can see that this can be expanded to hundreds of different searches, but Google lets you create 1,000 search terms in a single account, and AlertRank makes it easy to manage them.

When I first started selling microcomputers in 1979, it was impossible to describe to people how useful they were. Then VisiCalc came along, and all I had to do to sell an Apple II was give a 5 minute demo. In early 1995 I started telling anyone who would listen that the World Wide Web would change everything. I soon learned that the best way do this was to ask what they were interested in, and then show them some websites for that topic. Within minutes of seeing all that free content they wanted to know how they could sign up for an Internet account.

Now I need to explain why Google Alerts are an essential online marketing tool for any business. If I can show a lawyer, or a real estate agent how much great, actionable information is flowing past them without their even knowing it, the job of helping them manage their alerts will get a lot easier.

The first step is creating a couple of dozen public accounts for different types of businesses. I created three of them yesterday, and they are now starting to gather alerts. They are a bed and breakfast, a law firm, and a real estate firm.

I’ll explain the reasoning behind the alerts in each account in later blog posts. If you do online marketing or reputation management, I think you’ll find these accounts to be great sales tools for gaining new clients.

Are there any types of businesses you’d like to see illustrated with a public account? Would you like to be a part of this project, and help us create more useful accounts? Please contact me if you’d like to help: adam at alertrank dot com.

It’s so easy to set this up with Google Alerts, that every consultant and freelancer should do it for each client. Just create a Google Alert for the client’s name, company name, and a few industry keywords. Here’s an example for a well-known CEO: “steve jobs” OR “apple computer” OR iphone.

When an interesting alert comes along, you can copy out the link and paste it into a new email that you send as an FYI. You don’t have to read each alert email, just try to check them every month or so for something good on each client. I wouldn’t forward the Google Alert email itself. Revealing that you have a Google Alert on them is a little too aggressive, and defeats the idea that you came upon this naturally and immediately thought of them.

One of the less well-known search commands is the related: operator. It can be used to find sites that Google thinks are similar to a specific URL based on keywords and inbound link patterns. This doesn’t return a huge amount of results, but the ones it finds are usually interesting.
related:olivegarden.com

Another way to find competitors that often delivers a much higher flow of results is looking for comparative mentions, such as “better than [your brand]“. “Instead of [your brand]” also works well:
“better than olive garden”
“instead of olive garden”

Whenever Google Alerts delivers a competitor that you weren’t aware of, be sure to add an alert for that name and URL.

We even give you a set of cool badges you can add to your site to show people how to find your alerts. I’ve added my own to this blog’s sidebar.

A public account lets anyone view all your alerts, sources, and analytics pages, but they can’t change any data or delete any alerts. The public account URL is http://www.alertrank.com/public/[username]. Mine is at:
http://www.alertrank.com/public/adam

Public accounts also let your visitors create custom PDF reports from your alerts. I created this PDF report by selecting all the results for the search term Google Alerts over the last 2 days. I also ordered them by the AlertRank quality score to show the most influential results first.

We think that public accounts are a great tool for online PR, SEO and marketing companies to sell their services. You can show a potential client exactly what is being said about them and their competitors on the Web. This really explains the need for an active reputation management program for every organization. It’s the classic case of show rather than tell.