In the world of social media, your company must be diligent about monitoring and managing its online reputation. Certainly you can pay a firm to manage your online reputation, but you don’t have to. Here are 2 of my favorite tools for staying on top of online discussions about your brand and products. These tools are free and they help you both monitor and protect your online reputation.

Google Blog Search

www.google.com/blogsearch

So many of the damaging comments and conversations about brands and products start with a blog post. Protecting your online reputation requires being on top of the blogosphere. I really like Google Blog Search for staying on top of blog activity. It provides fresh, relevant search results from millions of feed-enabled blogs. Quickly and easily, you can search for blogs or blog posts by keywords. Users can narrow searches down to the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, or virtually any time frame.

Google Alerts  

www.google.com/alerts

Of course, there’s more to social media than blogs. There’s Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, Yelp, Yahoo Comments and so much more. Monitoring the web in order to protect your reputation can get overwhelming. For help, try Google Alerts. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries. You could type in your company name, product name, CEOs name, or anything you like. Google will then email you when something new pops up on the web based on your search terms. You can be emailed as it happens, once a day or once a week. I recently set up Google Alerts to help a client stay on top of online reactions during a massive product recall. You can use Google Alerts to monitor activity after a viral video hits or during a new product launch. The possibilities are endless.

Proactively monitor and manage your online reputation using free tools like Google Blog Search and Google Alerts. You’ll avoid major headaches later.

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Is your company monitoring complaints on Twitter, FaceBook, and blogs? If not, why not?

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