5 Free Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation

One of the most important things for companies to monitor today is your online reputation. Knowing what customers, clients, and even employees are saying about your company is something that you need to keep on top of. Regular monitoring is the only way to get under a problem before it blows up into something unmanageable. Of course, setting up a core good online reputation is always the first step. Then monitoring is the next step; however, both should be continuously ongoing. Here are 5 free tools that will help automate monitoring of your company’s online reputation:

1. IFTTT: IFTTT.com stands for If This Then That. It is a very handy website that allows you to make all kinds of what they call “recipes” that are automated events if something happens, then do this. There are all kinds of possibilities that you can browse through popular recipes or set up your own. To set up your own recipe that monitors industry websites you want to keep tracking of, set up an RSS feed that scans industry websites your want to keep a close eye on. Use the feed URL as the trigger part of the recipe and then you can set it up to email you the results.
2. Google’s Me on the Web Tool: This free service provided by Google allows you to look up what people are saying about any person (not just yourself). You can set up Google Alerts for mentions of other names including your company name, employees, or other related individuals such as key employees of competitors. This can obviously give insight into your competition’s online reputation and press releases, etc. in addition to your own company.
3. IceRocket: IceRocket.com is a free website that allows you to instantly search social sites for mentions of keywords or names you are interested in monitoring. If will search blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. There is a wide range of filtering options of the results so you can narrow down the information you are looking for to very specific parameters.
4. Topsy: Topsy.com is a very powerful Twitter search tool. Its search is even more powerful that Twitter’s own search feature. This allows you to find key influences related to your industry. In addition, it also rates sentiment over time. This insight into what key influencers is saying about your company is vital to your online reputation. It also gives you the knowledge of who to contact if you wanted to connect with these influencers.
5. Social Mention: SocialMention.com is another tool that helps you search for sentiment and social media mentions about your company. However, it is not limited to social sites, it scours other websites looking for feedback as well. Searches on social mention are real-time and they include sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, and last mention.