Carie Lewis has a great guide to monitoring your brand using iGoogle, it’s easy, free and most of us already have a Google account, plus it pulls all the information into one place.
She includes 5 different categories:
- Brand – mentions of your name, including acronyms, misspellings, etc
- Current – issues that people are talking about that involve you right now
- Detractors – people you know don’t like you but talk about you
- Competition – people in the same space as you
- Staff – prominent people in your org, like your CEO
And includes a great list of places you should monitoring:
- Google Alerts – I hope you know what they are and are already using them!
- Filtrbox – a paid monitoring service to make sure we catch everything
- Tweetmeme – tells you the most popular tweets about a subject
- Twitter Search – shows tweets containing a certain keyword (we don’t use this anymore because we use Tweetdeck separately)
- Technorati – shows blogs that mention certain keywords
- Blogpulse – another blog monitoring tool
- Digg – shows most popular articles on the web
- Boardreader – shows forum posts by keyword
Some additional readings
Librarian by Day 