I’ve spent the last few posts in this series focusing on the mechanics of managing sales lead alerts with AlertRank. Now I thought I’d switch gears and make some suggestions on search terms for finding local sales leads. Here are ten of my favorite techniques to deliver more alerts and more relevant results.

1. Google News alerts can be targeted to a specific, local news source, like a newspaper or TV station with the source: operator. You must set the alert type to News. The key is replacing spaces in the source’s name with underscores.
new restaurant source:boston_globe

2. The location: operator is another Google News alert option. This will work with a city, state, or country name. Again, put underscores where there are spaces in the name.
new restaurant location:los_angeles

3. This one is so obvious that people often miss it. You can add a zipcode to a Web search, and get a lot of highly specific results. Don’t be misled into thinking that Google “knows” the zipcode of every story. It is just matching the numbers in the zipcode to pages that have that value in the text, but since stories about businesses often include the address, it can be very effective. I would include this type of search in addition to your other alerts to see if it picks up something extra.
new restaurant 90210

4. The site: operator lets you specify parts of a domain name, which leads to a useful trick for finding items about US state agencies. They generally use the pattern of [state].gov in their domain names. This also finds local municipalities, because they often have domain names with [city].[state].gov.
new restaurant site:ca.gov
new restaurant site:sunnyvale.ca.gov

5. When you start searching government sites for leads, you’ll quickly realize that a lot of official notices are posted online in PDF format. You can use the filetype: operator to get alerts on these.
new restaurant permit filetype:pdf

6. If you use Twitter for marketing, you’ll always be looking for new people to follow. Google Alerts can notify you when a new profile is created with your keywords and desired location.
intext:”bio * restaurant” intext:”location * florida” site:twitter.com

7. Most people don’t think of Flickr as a site for finding sales leads, but it is actually great for local leads, because people often identify the location in the photo’s description. You can also follow people on Flickr, and get a steady stream of leads for topics they are interested in.
new restaurant dallas site:flickr.com

8. Craigslist is another great source of local leads, as long as you know how to find pages for your location. The pattern to look for is site:craigslist.org inurl:[city]. The best thing about Craigslist alerts that they usually have to do with economic activity, such as hiring, which is a great sign that this is a hot lead.
new restaurant site:craigslist.org inurl:boston

9. Review sites will also deliver good local leads, and I’ve had great results with Yelp.com. This site likes to put the location in the title of the review, so that is where you should look for it with the intitle: operator.
new restaurant intitle:”san francisco” site:yelp.com

10. When it comes to B2B sales leads, Linkedin.com can’t be beat. This is the best place I’ve found for leads to local trade associations and consultants.
restaurant california site:linkedin.com

The biggest weakness of Google Alerts as a lead generation tool is a total absence of reporting capabilities. The best you can do is forward individual emails, which is not a very effective way to share leads with your sales team. AlertRank adds a set of powerful Google alert reporting tools, including getting results as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF file.

Daily Excel summary

AlertRank automatically collects all the alerts you receive each 24 hours into an excel spreadsheet, and emails it to you every morning. Here is the spreadsheet I got this morning from the example grillalerts account.

The nice thing about getting this as an Excel file is that you can easily delete items, or add notes to others before emailing it to the sales staff. You can also control which alerts appear in the spreadsheet, or turn off delivery completely with the delivery settings page.

Daily PDF summary

AlertRank also delivers a PDF version of the alerts from the previous 24 hours each morning by email. This is a convenient format for sharing the alerts with clients or investors. Each alert in the PDF file has a link to the original page found by Google. Here is today’s PDF report for the grillalerts account.

The PDF summary has its own delivery settings page that has the same controls as the one for the Excel summary. You can control which types of alerts are delivered, and turn off the delivery with this page.

Custom PDF reporting

If you want even more control over your reports, you can open the Alerts Listing page, and select the print to PDF option. When you combine this with all the sorting, searching and selection options this page provides, you can create a highly customized report.

Here is a sample PDF report I created by customizing the columns displayed, sorting the results on Google PageRank, and selecting only those alerts for the search term “(renovate OR remodel) restaurant”.

Now that you know how to manage alerts more effectively, the next post in this series gives you my favorite tips for finding local sales leads with Google Alerts.

Managing multiple Google Alerts effectively is the key to extracting the best sales leads from the results Google sends you. AlertRank is designed to take over this management process from your email program. This post will cover the major features of the alerts listing page, where you will spend most of your time when using the site.

Search within your alerts
You can create highly specific search terms when you create your alerts, but then you could miss a lot of results. I find it better to create general searches, and then use the search within AlertRank to pull out the results I need. For example, instead of creating alerts for different cities, I created general alerts on new and remodeled restaurants. Now that I have the alerts, I can search for any city I want to work with. This is not going back to Google for the search. It’s just selecting the matching items within the alerts I have received.

Select by date
By default, AlertRank shows you all the alerts for the last 30 days, sorted with the most recent first. You can click on the date control to isolate a specific range of alerts by date.

Select by alert properties
When you click on the settings control, you get a wide range of selection options. You can choose just those alerts that came from Google News, allow commenting, and have a minimum Alertrank quality score, among other options.

These choices can be combined with a date range and search to let you pull out exactly the sales leads you need.

Custom column display
The alerts listing displays the most commonly used properties of each alert, but you can click the Customize Columns link to display a list of additional columns you want to see.

This choice of columns will become your new default, and will be shown whenever you use the site.

You can hide any of these columns with the same pulldown menu, and also set the display back to the original column settings.

Sort by alert properties
The listing is normally sorted by date received, but if you click any column heading, the list will be sorted by that column. Clicking the heading again reverses the order. I like to sort the alerts by the AlertRank quality score, so I can see the most important alerts at the top.

Setting the sentiment for each alert
The first column in the alerts listing is used to display the sentiment rating for each alert. This allows you to rate the alerts as positive or negative. This is done by clicking within this column. Some monitoring products try to judge the sentiment for you through textual analysis, but that generally depends on simplistic searches for words like “love” and “hate.” We explored this idea when building AlertRank, but soon realized that this doesn’t give the user enough control. When it comes to sales leads, you know best how to decide whether an alert is good or bad for your business. So you make the choice, and then as we’ll see later, AlertRank uses the setting in many ways.

Recording the alerts you’ve read
AlertRank knows which alerts you’ve read, just like an email program or feed reader.

It keeps track of when you click an alert to view its page, and then removes the bold face from the alert’s title to tell you that you’ve read this.

You can use the settings panel at any time to select just those alerts that you haven’t read. You can also reset the read status, if you want to keep this alert with the ones you haven’t read yet.

Deleting alerts
You can delete alerts individually, or select multiple alerts and delete them all at once.

The alerts trash listing will retain all the deleted alerts, so you can review them, and restore any that you change your mind about.

Learn how to share all the alerts you find with AlertRank in the next post in this series.

The catch-22 of Google Alerts is that the more results they deliver, the more they get in the way. This sample account is already getting 15 alerts a day, and that is with just 3 search terms. When you start following dozens of search terms, you could be receiving hundreds of alert emails a day. That is not a manageable number. AlertRank gives you lots of ways of controlling this flood of emails, and even allows you to turn off the emails entirely while still receiving alerts.

The email settings in AlertRank are found in the Alerts Management tab. Within this section of the product there is a separate page of settings for each of AlertRank’s delivery methods. Here is the email delivery page.

1. The first option lets you turn off email delivery completely. If you choose the Do Not Send option, you can still read all the alerts within the AlertRank website.

2. You can restrict the alerts you receive by email to those with a minimum AlertRank quality score. The higher the score, the more influential the alert’s source. So if you only want to see the hottest leads, set the minimum to a value of 6 or 7.

3. By default alerts for all the search terms are sent by email, but this control gives you the choice of receiving alerts for only specific keywords.

4. The final group of settings is based on properties of the pages found in the alert. These options are marketing and SEO related, and are useful if you want to leave comments on pages found in alerts to increase traffic to your site.

Regardless of how you limit your email delivery, all the alerts sent by Google will always be retained in your account on the AlertRank website. The next installment shows you how to slice and dice alerts within the AlertRank site.

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.

We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.

Alpert got a good bounce when he announced, but his rate of mentions have declined since, and the last week has been pretty much flatlined. I plan on exploring Alpert’s current online visibility, and putting together a plan for generating a little more buzz. This will take more work than I can cover in one blog post, so I’m going to make this my focus for the rest of this week.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the overall picture. The analytics page displays a summary of the total and daily average rate of mentions for all the current Google Alerts in this account. By clicking the total mention column, we can order them from highest to lowest to see how Dodd mentions compare to those for Alpert.

It looks like Dodd is getting about 5 times more mentions each than Alpert, So there is a lot of work to be done. In the next post we’ll analyze the sources of these alerts and see if there are some good sites for the Alpert people to run a commenting campaign.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.