I've done several presentations in the last few months on my usual subjects of SEO, PPC and social media which have gone down very well. These talks have ignited many peoples imaginations (not my words I must add!) to think differently about how they view their websites & online activity. Where I've had time, I've also discussed the subject of online brand reputation management, a growing issue for many businesses. Just the mention that it is possible has excited many people and when I've given advice on how to do it, it's sparked many more conversations.
With more and more people using social media in the UK and with web 2.0 sites being used more than ever before (where the user controls the conversation, not the website owner) it makes sense to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand and company online.
Monitoring your brand online is potentially a never ending job. But using some free Google tools, it can make your life a whole lot easier. If you're interested in finding out what is being said about your brand online, and have 10 minutes spare, I've outlined a step by step process below which should allow you to do just this. What have you got to lose? Potentially a lot if people are talking about your brand in the wrong way.
Note: There are many ways to do this, this is just what I believe to be the quickest to set up and most convenient way of keeping an eye on what is going on.
1. Go to Google.co.uk/ig
Like 90% of searchers in the UK, I prefer to use Google. If you didn't already know, Google allows you to personalise your own home page to be whatever you want it to be. To get to it, go to www.google.co.uk/ig
2. Get logged in on Google.co.uk/ig
If you've already got a Google account (you'll probably have one if you have a gmail.com or googlemail.com email address), then log in to your account. Otherwise click on the 'Sign In' link as shown below.
This will take you to a new page where you need to click 'Create an account now'
Fill in the form which creates your account and make sure that you leave 'Stay signed in' checked to on. When you're done, press 'I accept. Create an account'.
When you've done this, you'll get an email from Google as well as being logged into your new Google home page. You'll need to click a link which comes in the email to verify your account to allow your Google home page to work correctly.
3. Set Google.co.uk/ig as your home page
Rather than having to remember to check your Google home page each day to see if anything new has been added, it is alot easier to change your browser home page to be your default home page. Google home page is just the same as normal Google but with a few more bells and whistles added. Doing this will make make it alot easier to see what's going on, trust me. To do this in a newer version of IE, press 'Alt' on your keyboard which will show the menu bar. Then click Tools > Internet Options. If you're using Firefox, go to Tools > Options to get a very similar screen.
In the first box which shows up, enter www.google.co.uk/ig instead of whatever you have there currently and press OK. This means that whenever you click home on your browser from now on (or use the ALT + HOME buttons on your keyboard) you'll see your Google home page.
4. Adding Google alerts to your home page
Now that you've got a personalised page and have it set as your home page, you now need to add some alerts to the page so that you can see any brand mentions easily and quickly.
First thing to do is go to Google.co.uk/ig and click 'See your page' which will show your own page. This is the page which is now yours and that you'll be changing very soon. Google adds a variety of widgets to your page by default which you can delete or remove as necessary.
Now do a Google search for 'alerts'.
The first link (unsurprisingly) is Google Alerts. Click on the link to go to the alerts set up page.
If you are not logged in already, then you'll need to click on the link at the top and click 'Sign In'. When you created your Google account earlier, you would've received an email from them with a link to activate your account, which you need to have clicked to be able to sign in and make this process work.
Once signed in, enter the phrase that you want to monitor in the first box. In our example, we want to know what people are saying about our brand name, Adido, so we enter it into the box. Note, you can only enter and monitor one phrase at a time so if you want to check multiple phrases then you will need to repeat this process several times.
As we want to get this feed showing directly on our home page, we need to change the 'Deliver to' field to Feed.
Once we're happy with the feed settings, we press 'Create Alert' which will then generate the feed that we want to monitor. It will add it to the alert management centre which lists all of the alerts that have been set up in the past.
If you've just set up your first one, this list will look short so it'll be easy to find the one you've set up. What you need to get now is the feed data. Click on the 'Feed' link which will then show a long list of code, some of which might already mention the phrase you want to monitor (as shown here)
You need to tell Google home page about the feed that you've just created. To do this, click in the address bar and right click and press Copy. This will copy the unique address of the feed for you need.
Next, go back to your Google home page by clicking your home button on your browser or going to Google.co.uk/ig. On the right hand side about a third of the way down you'll see an 'Add stuff' link which you need to click.
Welcome to Google gadget world. This page lists thousands of different widgets or gadgets (or whatever you want to call them) that you can add to your home page to make your life easier. You can play around with this later, but for now, you need to go to the bottom left and click on the 'Add feed or gadget' button.
When you click on this, a larger box will appear which is where Google asks you to add your feed. Hopefully you've done nothing since copying the link so it works ok. In this box you can right click and press Paste which will put the feed your created and copied into the box. Press 'Add' and Google will then verify the feed that you've added and after a few seconds will come back with a tick to show that it liked it and that it is now added to your home page! Success!
Now go back to your Google home page and you'll see that a new widget/gadget has been added listing any mentions that Google has picked up about your targeted search term. Superb!
If your feed has been added but has no content listed, then it means that Google hasn't picked up anything recently. Don't worry, it can take some time (up to several days) for your feed to pick up content up so be patient, it will appear! If you want to see more than the three listings shown here, you can click on the small drop down box on the right hand side of the pale blue bar shown above and change the settings to be how you'd like them.
That's it! You've now got Google telling you about things it knows which match the search phrase you want to monior. If you want to know more, go through the same steps and you'll be able to build up a list of phrases to monitor quickly and easily.
What do you do with this data? If people are talking about your brand online then you should try and interact with them. Normally comments on blog and forums allow links to be posted which can come back to your website. The more links pointing to your website, the better and this will, over a longish period of time (most likely months), improve your rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why not go further and pick up on anything relevant to your industry and comment on it? This will help build your name outside of your immediate network of contacts.
This tool is really, really helpful. We recently discovered a couple of potentially huge issues relating to the Adido brand using Google Alerts which we have taken action on. If we didn't have this set up we wouldn't have found them and we probably would be none the wiser to what people were doing with our brand. More on this in due course...
Any questions or problems, please leave a comment.
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