My 15 Minutes of Fame: Google Alerts

Showing posts with label Google Alerts. Show all posts

Thursday, May 2, 2013

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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Friday, June 29, 2012

Top 5 Ways to Engage Consumers with Social Media

Image representing Google Alerts as depicted i...

Image via CrunchBase

5. Listen Before You Speak: Just like attending a “social” in real life, you need to mind your manners. Before you campaign to be the king or queen, learn what people are saying about your brand. Free tools, like Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts and Twitter Hashtag Alerts, allow you to receive an e-mail every time a consumer writes a review, blogs or rants (positively or negatively) about your product or service.

Many paid tools, like Radian6, Visible Technologies, Buzz Logic and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, allow for an even deeper understanding of sentiment and can track, monitor and point you toward the best course of persuasion over time. Many reputation management tools also allow you to track your competitors and observe what works or doesn’t work for them, so you can be sure not to repeat the same mistakes.

Identifying your natural brand ambassadors (consumers that love your products) and dealing positively and proactively with those that haven’t had a wonderful experience will pay back many times over in word of mouth, brand loyalty and register ring.

4. Write To Your Fans: Brands that post social media content 20 or more times a month consistently receive five times more traffic than those who post less than four times a month(Source: Hubspot). Take into account when you are posting your content. Monitor whether certain posts delivery more engagement in the morning, around lunchtime or in the evening. How well do your weekend posts perform? Many social networks allow you to post content to specific geographic regions, such as announcing a TPR to consumers that live near locations of a specific account, thus driving more foot traffic and sales lift. They are your fans and friends. They want to hear from you.

3. Find the Key: Locking your best content and requiring a visitor to “like” or enter an e-mail address before proceeding enables you to track who is viewing your content. It also allows you to reward your most interested fans for participating with your brand. With a lock, the “key” is to boost your engagement rates, produce a viral effect and will allow your content to be viewed by even more consumers. Build your e-mail marketing club (e-Club) and post teaser content that encourages your readers to click through and dig deeper. Share existing assets such as TV commercials or print ads — new or nostalgic. Track your click-through rates, relevant comments, re-tweets, shares, views and many more metrics to get a better understanding of what your community responds to — and how you can help move them along the path-to-purchase.

2. Ask And Yee Shall Receive: The whole point of social media is to socialize. Curious what your next product should be? Ask! You might be surprised at how great of a place your community is to turn to for information. Make your fans feel special and encourage them to interact with your brand by showcasing your customers on your page. Respond to questions and comments in a timely matter, even if it is more difficult to address. Offer positive solutions whenever possible. Remember that everyone is a key influencer in social media — some just have more volume than others. You don’t want to be put on blast.

1. Entertain & Educate: Consumers can easily “unlike” or “unsubscribe”. They value their time and you want them to spend more of it with your brand. Create content they value — useful tips, recipes, links to printable or save to loyalty card coupons, fun facts about your history, interesting quotes and even pop culture trivia. Include photos and links. Remember the three L's:

Laugh - Will your audience think it’s funny such as the latest Internet meme?
Learn - Will your customer discover something s/he didn’t know like as a special deal?
Love - Would you be thrilled to get it in your own inbox? How about a link to a sweepstakes to introduce a new product? Branded content such as an original webisode or an advergame to take up a few minutes of a hectic day?

If your communication doesn’t entertain and educate, then you are missing a huge opportunity to connect.

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Friday, April 13, 2012

5 Ways to Gauge Your SEO Effectiveness

Keeping track of where you stand for purposes of evaluating the effectiveness of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is a key to making them work well for you. But what is the best way to do that? Here are several tips for gauging how well your SEO is working.

Page Rank

Just do a search for your keywords and see where your web site falls. If it’s in the top five ranks on the first page, as a result of a search around the most important key words, you’ve got good visibility and traffic is likely to come. If not, you might want to look at improving the relevance of the site’s content, form, meta-data, etc. to those keywords.

Site Visits Per Month

The whole idea behind SEO is to drive more people to visit the web site, so this is really the acid test. If you have a high number of monthly site visits, that’s an initial indicator that your SEO strategy is working. However, it’s not the final indicator, not the be-all and end-all.

Page Views

No, this is not the same measure as site visits. It’s a measure of the number of times people view pages incorporated into your web site. The problem is that someone may see your page show up on a search, click the link thinking it might be what they’re looking for, quickly determine that it’s not, and go back. If that happens, you haven’t driven any business your way. This is a sign that you haven’t done a good job of relating keywords to content.

Time On Site

This has to do not only with the effectiveness of SEO but also with the design of the site itself. A site that is well designed, easy to navigate, and easy on the eyes will find people spending more time on the average browsing it. It relates to SEO as well, for the same reason that page views does: a person who clicks a link by mistake isn’t going to spend a lot of time on the site, most likely, while someone who finds content appropriate to what he’s searching for will.

Links From Outside

Perhaps the real acid test is how many links are created from outside web pages inbound to yours. Inbound links are an important way to drive traffic your direction, and they also increase the site’s ranking in searches. When people are linking your site on their Facebook pages, referencing and linking your site in their blogs, and so on, then you know you are receiving not only high volumes of traffic but high quality traffic as well.

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Data in a social age

Like. Tweet. Follow. Mention. Comment. What do these all mean to a marketer?

There’s no doubt that social has gone loco in the past few years and every big brand worth its marketing salt is investing in a strong social presence as part of their multichannel strategy.

But so what? What is social delivering?

What is it adding to the marketing mix, and how do we know if you’re any good at it?

The big challenge with social right now is data.

A recent Econsultancy report highlighted the social paradox – it’s the area of marketing with the highest growth in terms of investment yet it’s the channel we struggle most to measure in terms of impact.

There are a few contributing factors; the lack of clarity in terms of metrics that define success, confusion about what data you are permitted to collect and how to interpret this data.

Let’s start with measurement metrics.

A marketing director at Diageo recently commented that “size matters” and was subject to a fair amount of flak from his peers and experts.

Initial attempts at measuring social success were based on number of likes or followers; but any good database marketer knows you can have 2m people on the database, but if they are not actively engaging with your brand then they are not delivering value.

Social is about driving conversation and engagement and any measurement should be based around these areas.

What am I allowed to do?

There seems to be apprehension and uncertainty relating to social data and permissions, probably because some of the rules and regulations are currently being defined.

Obviously you need to follow the letter of the law and, if in doubt, there are countless experts who can tell you the legal standpoint on this data.

However, I think the easiest approach to social data involves our dear old friend common sense. You should treat social as you do other channels.

Consider what data will be useful to you and only put effort into this data.

But don’t just think about what you want, think about it from the consumer’s perspective and what is acceptable to use from an ethical standpoint.

The best decisions will be made by marketers who also think about the consumer’s point of view.

What does social data mean?

We all know data is useless without some interpretation; data needs to be translated into insight that is actionable.

Social data is often collected and approached with 'that’s interesting' versus 'I know X therefore we will do Y'.

Having clear goals from social will help you define actions based on the data you collect; if you’re know what you’re looking to achieve then modelling or data interpretation will have a direction.

But social is not an island

Social data should not be considered in isolation. You’re missing a trick if you don’t consider what you can glean from social to help inform your other channels and marketing across the spectrum. Data is most powerful when you have the bigger picture.

So like data, it can provide you with insight.

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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Why Bother Monitoring Social Media? Part 2

In a previous post we talked about the need and process for Social Media Monitoring. Starting now we will review 12 different tools.

Google Alerts

An oldie but a goodie! Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors, for example, and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.

When combined with iGoogle, you can create a pretty nice consolidated page that contains the latest findings for your selected keywords. When it comes to monitoring social media, this is the least you should be doing; it’s free and an absolute snap to set up.

Coming up next a post on Twitter Advanced Search

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Friday, April 6, 2012

Six Reasons Why You Should Care About Social News

Social news is a type of social media website. Submitted links are the centerpiece of this type of social media.

Three core features of social news:

Users submit links to articles, photos, videos, etc.
Users vote on submitted content.
Highest rated content is featured on the homepage.

Some of the more popular social news sites areDigg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Here are 6 reasons why social news matters for your business or website.

1. Massive Amounts of Traffic

The biggest attraction of social news sites is the massive amount of traffic they can bring in a short period of time. It can be upwards of 50,000+ page views in a single day. Getting on the homepage of Digg once often wakes up an addict-like craving in the webmaster to "go popular" again.

Unfortunately, most of those 50k readers from a social news site will immediately leave your site after reading the article. Without clicking on any ads, looking around the site, or buying any products (or subscribing to your feed). On top of that, having thousands of them visiting your site at the same time might kill your web server. Some people come right out and say Digg traffic sucks.

Yes, the vast majority of social news visitors won't "convert" (whatever that means to your particular website), but they're still worth it because of what comes after the massive wave of traffic.

Besides, who would rather not get those 50,000 page views? Not me.

2. Bump in Subscribers and Regular Readers

The biggest social news sites like Digg or Reddit can send upwards of 50,000 page views in a single day. It's a big win even if only 1% of the primary traffic spike finds your site interesting enough to bookmark, subscribe, share, or blog about. That's potentially 500 new subscribers or sales!

The good news is that we can expect the conversion rate to increase as more niche social news sites pop up. Instead of massive, non-sticky traffic, the social news sites of the (near) future will send smaller bursts of highly targeted traffic that will be much more likely to click around your site and/or subscribe to your feed or newsletter.

3. Inbound Links and Targeted Traffic

In addition to the bump in subscribers or bookmarks, you can expect a wave of new inbound links.

Those new inbound links (a vote of confidence for your site) will send a secondary wave of traffic. This wave will be smaller, but it will be highly targeted traffic.

The links themselves add significant long-term value because the number and relevancy of inbound links to your website directly determines how well you rank in search engine results.

4. High Return On Investment

When done properly, a social media campaign can provide a very high ROI.

You can spend a day or so writing one article. If that article goes popular on one or more social sites, you can expect thousands of visitors and links.

Going with our previous estimate of a 1% conversion rate, compare a successful social news campaign with the cost of acquiring 500 new subscribers or customers. How many comments would you have to leave on other blogs? How many clicks (and how much per click) would you have to pay to get that kind of sales bump?

5. Establish Your Online Brand / Reputation

If you are an insanely helpful and interesting contributor to the community, you can build quite a following in your niche. Having potential customers see you as an industry/niche leader is a very big competitive advantage.

A social news site is just another form of an online community. The same strategies and benefits of successful forum marketing apply to social media sites. Be helpful. Don't rock the boat. Don't over-promote yourself.

6. Social News Is The Future -- And We Need More Thought Leaders

Social media is still in its infancy. The field is currently dominated by tech and humor centric sites that appeal to an early adopter user base.

But it's expanding. Social news is getting more mainstream everyday. Within 5 years, we'll see a social news site for every conceivable topical or business niche.

Whether you sell Harry Potter books or write a blog about rare orchids, there's probably a social news site being built (or already built) for you. Social news is expanding into an ever larger number of niches. And we're going to need thought leaders in every niche.

Sites like Mixx let users create their own categories, and only see those categories on the Mixx homepage. This feature lets users basically "create their own" social news site. Digg is planning to roll out a similar feature within a few months, and Reddit has recently open sourced its source code for anyone to use. Other open source software like Pligg and Drigg are already powering niche social news sites.

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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Make the Most out of Social Media

Most used social media channels today are Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Youtube channels. While Facebook is explosive in membership growth, whereas Twitter allows you to share up to date short messages to your followers. Linked-in is great for professional and business to business connections, while Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google. Blogs are diaries for regular entries on a certain subject, or many subjects.

Here are some tips on how to make full use of them:

1) There’s Google Reader, Twitter Search, Google Alerts and Google Blog Search that allow you to keep yourself updated on topics relevant to you.

2) Use facebook page not as just a ‘page’, but as a community portal to customers, potential customers and vendors.

3) How to get top ranked in Linked-in search: Make full use of the headline, work experience key words and summary key words too.

4) When you tweet, put your name after your tweet. If it gets forwarded, your name, the source, gets forwarded to.

5) The biggest leverage for business in Youtube channels is to feature consumer testimonials.

6) If you get mental block in writing for your blogs, get yourself excited about a topic. Then immediately write all your ideas down quickly. I mean really quick, like as if you have a ferocious dog chasing you. Don’t edit until you got it all down.

7) Model after good blogs.

My 15 Minutes of Fame

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Mobile Video: The Next Social Trend