Blog: Five Tools to Monitor & Manage Your Online Reputation (Before It’s Too Late)

Ever stumble across a six month old negative review about your company and wish you had found it earlier?

Ever find something you wrote - like a presentation, blog post or whitepaper - copied word-for-word on another company's website?

Ever wonder what else has been written about you or your company all across the vast internet world?

Now you don't have to wonder anymore. And you don't have to take time looking either. Below are five free tools that can be used to have alerts about any of the above situations and more sent right to your email inbox.

1. Yext Rep www.yext.com/rep/

Yext Rep, launched in May of last year, will monitor all of the major business review sites, including Yelp, Yahoo, Google Yellowbook, CitySearch and Bing, and send you a daily or weekly report of what it discovers.

Yext will also notify you if it can’t find your business on one of the above and prompt you to add it. You can also link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to Yext to get a feed of your own Tweets and fan page, and allow you to update both from your Yext dashboard.

You can also add your clients or your competition’s info to Yext so you can keep an eye on what is being said about them as well.

2. Google Alerts www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts is a tool that will alert you via email when a keyword or phrase you select is newly found on the internet. Most people are familiar with Google Alerts, but unfortunately most aren’t using it to its fullest potential.

What keywords and phrases should you set up alerts for? Well, your name and your business name of course. Enclose phrases in quotations, so you will only get alerts for the entire phrase and not each individual word.

Also set up alerts for names of individual key products or services you sell, especially if they are your customized or patented product lines with trademarked names. Set up an alert for events you host or are a sponsor of, organizations you are a member of or support.

But also, set up alerts for unique phrases on your website or blog. Unfortunately, internet plagiarism is at an all time high with new or struggling ventures stealing web content rather than writing their own. Google Alerts can help you and your attorney nip this practice in the bud pronto.

Basically, you can set up a Google Alert for anything that you want to monitor internet buzz for as soon as it happens.

3. TweetBeep http://tweetbeep.com

TweetBeep is pretty much the Google Alerts for Twitter. You can set up alerts for your Twitter username, a keyword or phrase, or a hashtag (a hashtag is a # before a word to make it more easily searchable).

Like Google Alerts, set up alerts for your company, your Twitter username, your product names proceeded by a hashtag or anything you want to monitor on the Twittersphere.

With TweetBeep, you can set up 10 free alerts before being prompted to upgrade to a paid product. For most people though, ten is enough.

4. Openbook www.youropenbook.org

Openbook is kind of the odd one out in this group as it is really meant to be somewhat of an anti-Facebook site. Openbook founders are concerned about Facebook privacy so created Openbook to demonstrate how much is being said about anyone, by anyone at any time on Facebook.

Unlike the above though, Openbook does not require an account,  nor does it email you your results. Searches are real time and one time, so you must repeat the search whenever you want to see results.

I think it is useful though to quickly search Facebook for chatter about companies, news items, organizations, or just about anything else you can think of but don’t want to set up an email alert for.

5. Social Mention Alerts www.socialmention.com/

Social Mention is the Google Alerts for social media that allows you to set up alerts and receive daily email notifications when your search terms appear on over 80 social media sites and blogs. You can even narrow down your search to only look in blogs, news, video etc… or simply select “all”.

Social Mention also has a browser search plugin that is incredibly useful for searching social media sites right from within your browser. Social Mention also has a chunk of javascript that you can add to your website or blog and display a “Buzz Widget” about any key word or phrase you choose.

There you have it! almost everything you need to keep an eye on what is being said about you on the internet, and let you know who is saying it.