Tech bloggers need to be on top of all the latest news, and even when their personal network delivers news before it breaks, they still need to keep track of how the rest of the Web is covering them and their areas of interest. This public Google Alerts account is an example of how a professional blogger like Robert Scoble can use Google Alerts to track mentions of themselves, and collect news for blog posts. This is only one tool that a blogger should use in their work. Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook are additional ways of keeping up to date. If you aren’t familiar with the search syntax used in these alerts, you can review our Google Alerts Tutorial.
Name and website
scoble OR scobleizer
site:scobleizer.com
link:scobleizer.com -site:scobleizer.com
People of interest
“dave winer” OR “steve gillmor” OR “shel israel” OR arrington
Topics of interest
“2010 web”
twitter OR friendfeed OR facebook
Sponsors and products
“building 43″ OR building43 OR link:building43.com
rackspace OR link:rackspace.com
Here is the account now in AlertRank.
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.
Tagged as:
AlertRank,
blogging,
Google Alerts,
public account
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Now that the public Google Alerts account for the law firm Ropes & Gray has been collecting results for a week, let’s take a look at what we’ve found, and see if there is any useful material for marketing their services. Opening the account, and going to the Analytics tab, we can scroll down to see how the alerts are distributed among the various search terms.
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.
Tagged as:
AlertRank,
Google Alerts,
Legal marketing,
public account
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