From the category archives:

Reputation management

Best practices for automatic posting of Google Alerts to Twitter

by Adam Green on July 6, 2009

in AlertRank, Announcements, Autotweet, Google Alerts, Marketing, Public accounts, Reputation management, SEO, Twitter

Auto-tweeting of Google Alerts has become one of the most popular features in AlertRank, and now that AlertRank accounts are free these auto-tweets are popping up everywhere. We’ve added lots of controls that let you fine tune your auto-tweeting, and I wanted to point these out.

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.

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  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.

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Reputation monitoring with Google Alerts for a brand manager: Viagra

by Adam Green on June 3, 2009

in AlertRank, Brand management, Google Alerts, Reputation management

The public Google Alerts account for Viagra gives us an opportunity to see how reputation monitoring can be done in practice with AlertRank. The first step is getting an overview of how much traffic each of our alerts is receiving. This can be done by clicking the Analytics tab, and scrolling down to the summary table at the bottom of the page. We can order the results by the average number of alerts received each day by clicking the column heading for Average.

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One area we want to focus on for reputation monitoring is reports of problems with the product. The search term viagra (”side effect” OR “side effects” OR recall OR reaction OR “lawsuit” OR litigation OR refund) is getting an average of 8 alerts a day. We can review these alerts by clicking this row in the summary table. By default the alerts are listed in date order, but to help us concentrate on the most influential, we can click the AlertRank column to sort the results. AlertRank is a measure of influence that combines Google PageRank with other ranking factors. The higher the value, the more influential the source.

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There are a lot of alerts to review here. It might be necessary to share this data with others to get everything done, so we can save the results to a PDF report and share it by email. This is done by clicking the PDF link in the top right corner, which creates this file.

Let’s focus in on one of the sources of these alerts. The Huffington Post has a story that is extremely negative.  We should learn more about the stories this source has been writing about the brand. To do this, we click the alert from the Huffington Post, and then click the Additional Source Data link in the top right corner of the page. This gives us a detail page for this source.

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We have been ignoring the sentiment rating for the alerts. That’s the first column with the up and down hand icons at the top. This allows you to rate each alert as positive, negative or neutral. You can’t change this unless you are logged into the account. I’ll rate each story for this source, and then you can see what the results would look like.

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Well, I wouldn’t describe this as a friendly source. 75% of the stories are downright hostile. I’ve produced a PDF report for this source, so others can review what we’ve found. Maybe some well placed ads on the site are called for.

Reputation monitoring is just the first step in using Google Alerts for brand management. In future posts I’ll look at using the public account to enhance a brand’s reputation.

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How to sell online marketing with public Google Alerts accounts

May 14, 2009

We’ve started a new project to take advantage of public AlertRank accounts. We will be creating a series of public accounts to collect Google Alerts for specific industries. The biggest problem with trying to explain the need for reputation management and lead generation through Google Alerts is actually showing people what you can find. This [...]

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Realtime search vs. permanent reputation

May 10, 2009

I took time off a few years ago to go back to school and study the history of technology. What I learned is that most people involved with technology aren’t interested in history. They are too busy searching for the next big thing. Right now the big thing is realtime search. I’m a techie myself, [...]

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