In the first part of this series, I provided an overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM) and why it’s an important activity to adopt in your business and professional life. This post will outline some of the free tools available for monitoring your online reputation.
Blog Monitoring
1. BackType Blog Comments Monitoring – This tool indexes conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media. It also has an alert function that e-mails updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment.
2. BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a blog search engine with several complementary tools such as Trend Search and Conversion Tracker that analyzes the data it collects.
3. Google Blog Search – This is a Google beta search engine for blogs.
4. Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing millions of blog posts in real time. It also tracks the authority, influence and popularity of blogs.
Twitter Monitoring
5. Monitter – A real-time Twitter monitor for up to three keywords at a time.
6. TweetBeep – This tool provides hourly Twitter alerts sent via e-mail. You can specify keywords, people and links to track.
7. Tweet Later – TweetLater has a number of features for Twitter users, and it also monitors Twitter and e-mails you a digest of the tweets that contain your specified keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies.
8. Twitter Search – Twitter Search was formally Summize. It searches all Twitter activity for keywords, links or user activity in real time.
Link Monitoring
9. BackTweets – This is a service by BackType that provides an engine to search for specific links mentioned on Twitter.
10. WhoLinksToMe – A link search tool that tracks backlinks and makes them easily sortable by anchor text, origination, and by the target URL with enhanced reporting capability. You can also import links from Google Webmaster Tools for enhanced analysis.
Other Tools
11. Google Alerts – Your keyword search results are sent via e-mail for keyword mentions in news, web, blogs, video and groups categories.
12. BoardTracker – This tool searches discussion boards and forum threads for your specified keywords. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts.
13. MonitorThis – MonitorThis is a search aggregator for up to 26 search engine feeds.
14. Naymz – A social network focused on reputation, personal branding, and identity verification. Basic version is free.
15. Purewire Trust – An online portal that helps people verify reputation information about themselves and those with whom they interact online. You can search by e-mail address, URL or web application.
16. Yasni – This is a search engine dedicated to finding people on the web through publicly available information, including images, videos, social networking profiles and posts.
With the number of tools available, you will probably need to do some research to determine which services fulfill your needs. Usually a mix of a few of these free services will cover your bases, but you will need time to do the manual work necessary for the tools that are not automated.
If you prefer to have more of the work done for you, there are also a number of paid tools available to monitor your online reputation:
- BrandsEye – Starting at $1 USD/month
- Naymz – Premium service is $9.95 USD/month
- ReputationDefender’s MyReputation – $14.95 USD/month
- Trackur – Starting at $18 USD/month
Do you use any of these tools? Which would you recommend?
Related posts:
- Online Reputation Management: The Basics
- Online Reputation Management: How to Handle Negative Publicity
Screenshot taken from BlogPulse Trend Search.
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For Twitter, don’t forget TwitterSpy. It gives you back Twitter’s IM and track features so you can track any number of keywords that you like, not just three.
May 21st, 2009 at 6:24 am
Great tools! Could you please include BuzzDing! Reputation Management to your list?
May 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am
Backtype is an excellent tool for spotting commentary, but I’ve found it frustrating that when I click on the ‘view article’ links from the keyword feed it takes me to backtype.com, rather than direct to the source article.
Sure if I want to see more comments from the individual, backtype the place to be, but if I want to see the article and get real context behind the comment, going to backtype.com then to the article, seems like a grab for page views, rather than an ideal customer experience. But hey, it’s free so maybe I need to get off my high horse :).
An idea for a follow up post could be what to do when you find commentary critical about you or your business. Whilst it’s cool to find what people are saying, how you re-act is more important.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
dont you have RSS feeds newsletter ??? how come ?
May 21st, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Big Hands for this post. Now I have to study a lot of new stuff :(
May 21st, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Alyssa! great info… its really helpful
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:01 am
@ShayneTilley Ask and ye shall receive :-)
Online Reputation Management: How to Handle Negative Publicity
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 am
I like the twitter tools. I find many of the functions specified are found in tweet deck.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 am
All I have to say is that Buzzding is certainly doing quite a good job at monitoring what’s being said online about ORM and getting their brand more exposure. Alyssa posted this article at 5:06am and it only took Buzzding a little more than 4 hours to REACT although their name was not even mentioned. I believe ORM is all about “reaction” and having the right tools to do so. Good jobs guys, I’m watching you ;-)
May 24th, 2009 at 7:02 am
Great post!
I would also like to recommend creating a profile on LookupPage, a personal branding & ORM tool that helps people and businesses create a personal web page, always visible at the first page of Google when someone searches their name. Such a service can help you easily add a positive result on search engines and help your ORM efforts. It has free and paid versions. You can check it out if you like :-)
May 26th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Have you guys seen http://tweetgrade.com
?
June 10th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Is anyone aware of a company named Reputation Armor? I paid this company and now there is no one around to answer phone calls or emails. Any suggestions would be great
June 10th, 2009 at 2:40 am
This is a great collection of tools. I would also recommend checking out Social Mention – http://socialmention.com
June 12th, 2009 at 12:16 am
Jerry,
I use that company for our night club that had some bad press… I just spoke with them (my account rep Jayson) and they always answer my calls. Try calling them again and emailing them again. Maybe your emails are being blocked. They always communicate with me and do a great job.
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Alyssa,
Thanks for the list of tools. I am trying to start using twitter and other social sites to get a following for our local night club.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:33 pm