brand marketing blog

Now that we're all blogging, tweeting and facebooking, our online contributions are out there for all to see, circulate, discuss and comment on. If you're networking online and building a tribe or community of followers, it's important to see how you, your brand or your organisation are being talked about and by whom.

In the traditional offline model we would engage a clipping agency to read targeted publications and media vehicles and then report back on any mentions that we may have received. This costs money and response times are a few days at best, but generally longer.

In the online world you can keep track of your own online reputation for free and as it happens. There are some great tools available that provide virtually immediate notification of any comment, posting, referral or indexing by Google for a specified keyword or phrase. My favourites are:

GOOGLE ALERT
This is free and you can set up as many alert keywords as you like. Google will send you an email as soon as any web content containing your keyword is indexed. http://www.google.com/alerts

ICEROCKET
This great tool also allows you to do real-time searches for any keyword mentioned in blogs, the web, Twitter and MySpace. You can subscribe to the alerts via RSS feed and have them delivered into your Google Reader account. http://www.icerocket.com/

If you have any other good alert tools I'd love to hear about them.