Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

I’ve signed up for a number of beta invitations lately for reputation monitoring websites. These are web utilities which aggregate mentions of your favorite keywords: “chicago marketing”, “chicago seo”, “lindsey lohan”, whatever. The one feature that some of the newer sites have over previous iterations are historic records. Let’s review some of the oldies, but goodies first:

Google Alerts

Any savvy marketer should already have Google alerts set up and running on a daily basis. Google alerts is nice in that it’s first and foremost, free. It’s also reliable and very easy to set up and turn off. In case you’re not already familiar, Google alerts allows you to enter a key phrase or set of keywords and create daily, “as it happens”, and weekly alerts. The as-it-happens alerts can be both very useful, but also very overwhelming if you are in a volatile field. It’s good for product launches or PR campaigns, where instant feedback from customers/users is vital for the success of the launch For example, Company A launches a website. 100,000 people sign up instantly. The website crashes. The blogosphere goes crazy. Google alerts in a great way to head off these issues. The only issue with Google alerts is that if you have a broad keyword or huge brand (i.e. Honda), you’re going to get everything under the sun in terms of references, so make sure to be super specific when creating these alerts.

Google Trends

Similar to the volume of email you receive from Google alerts, Google trends allows you to see patterns of mentions over time. In this example of Honda versus Toyota, you can see the mentions associated with each brand over time. This is a good utility to use to see if your PR efforts have paid off over time. Google trends will even show major spikes in traffic and pull in related news materials for the time scale you select (i.e last 30 days, last 12 months, etc.). This is an excellent tool to use in conjunction with Google alerts.

Ok now to the new fun stuff…

Trackur

Trackur bills themselves as “Google alerts on steroids”, which is a pretty bold claim, as Google alerts already does a pretty good job. So what does Trackur do that alerts doesn’t? Well, first off I have to say, I’ve never actually used Trackur, so I’m only relating what their websites says. Anyone who has actually used it, let me know if it’s worth $18/month to start. Trackur says that it searches all media, not just Google (which is what Google alerts searches - but on a sidenote, Google seems to have a pretty good handle on the world’s information, so what else is Trackur searching?). Trackur also allows for more in depth filtering than Google alerts along with saving mentions of your keywords for later review and sharing them with colleagues. Overall, I’m still a bit skeptical without being able to a direct comparison to Google alerts. They do have a free 14 day trial, so if you sign up and find it’s a good fit, let me know in the comments.

Addict-o-Matic

Addict-o-matic is egosurfing on steroids. You can quote me on that, addict-o-matic marketing department. Addict-o-matic is nice in that it pulls in search queries from many different websites in one easy-to-view search interface. Looking up a popular brand, Facebook, yields some pretty fun results from numerous sites without actually having to run out to those sites. This tool can be useful as a daily checkup on any brand doing social media optimization for videos images, blog posts, twitter, etc. A great future feature would be to provide updates to users if anything changes on these pages, so I don’t have to continually come back. Ah well, it’s free and it works.

FiltrBox

I’ve been using Filtrbox for the last few days to monitor some of my clients mentions on the web. It’s got a really slick interface, and again, it’s free. Like Google alerts, you enter search criteria and it sends you daily alerts as to the status of the keyword mentions it finds. You can also chart mentions over time, similar to Google Trends. You can also add direct plugins for source material from mainstream media, the blogosphere, Twitter, and Twitter’s nemesis, Friendfeed. It also provides some really nice login structuring to allow for deep filtering. So I can create a filter that says “honda AND (toyota OR chrysler) AND EXCLUDE hybrid AND SUV”. It also allows for direct importing from Google alerts, which is the mark of someone who knows who their competitors are and embraces it. Nicely done Filtrbox!