5 Free Tools to Manage Your Online Reputation

With a strong reputation, you attract new clients, keep the ones you have, and grow. And while in the old days, managing a company reputation meant managing public perception across geography, today the Internet adds another important layer.

Is your brand being talked about on blogs and social media? Do you know what people are saying about you online? You should.

Here’s a look at five of the top tools for managing your online reputation:

1. Google Alerts

Every business should set up Google Alerts for its brand name, if only because the process is so easy and convenient. Simply go to google.com/alerts and fill out your search query (company name) and how you want results delivered. You can filter results to include only certain forms of media (such as blogs or news or video), and you can have results sent to your email address or a feed reader. The results update you every time your brand is mentioned.

2. TweetBeep

What Google Alerts is to the Internet, TweetBeep is to Twitter. Sign up for the free version of this service, and get updated hourly every time you’re mentioned on Twitter. TweetBeep searches for Tweets linking to your website or blog (even within shortened URLs), replies and mentions, brand mentions, etc. It also comes in a premium version for $20/month that provides 200 alerts, a 15-minute-update option, and no ads.

3. Social Mention

SocialMention gathers an enormous amount of data regarding how and where your brand is mentioned online. You give the tool a keyword (your brand name) and it reveals a host of mentions, ranking each one as either positive, negative, or neutral. The only problem is that because the data pull from such a wide breadth of sources, irrelevant results do appear. Therefore, Social Mention is most useful if you’re a huge, recognized brand or have a particularly unique name.

4. Kurrently

Think of Kurrently as a search engine to check from time to time for brand mentions. As simple and user-friendly as Google, this tool provides real-time results for the keyword you give it (your brand name). Kurrently won’t email updates the way Google Alerts does, but its results are immediately updated and relevant, making it worth a visit.

5. MonitorThis

MonitorThis is a particularly interesting tool that tracks the mention of your brand name on over 20 different search engines. Simply enter your name in the search box and click the “make monitor.opml” button; the tool then generates a file to import into your feed reader. From that point forward, all mentions of your brand that come up in search results go straight to your feed.

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