I’m going to date myself with this one, but part of my first job after college was to open and categorize a big packet of newspaper clippings that came into our office every few days. We subscribed to a “clipping service,” which used to be the only surefire way to monitor mentions of a person or company in the media.
Technology has made it possible to more easily and affordably increase your opportunity for brand impressions beyond the traditional print outlets — with video content (either online or on TV), audio content (podcasts and radio), and of course all of the other online opportunities (social media or blog mentions, digital newspaper articles and beyond). Up your public relations strategy and enhance your content marketing end game by creating news alerts.
For purposes of this blog, I’m going to share all of the tips I’ve learned with Google Alerts, a free and user-friendly way to begin monitoring your name or company name online.
1. Make sure you enter your full name, all legal and DBA iterations of your name, including with and without the LLC or Inc. abbreviations.
2. If at first you don’t receive the hits you were hoping for, play around with the use of quotation marks for exact word matches, use an asterisk (*) for a wild card word, or use the minus sign (-) to eliminate certain words.
3. It may also be a good idea to set up alerts for the names of products or services you offer, or even enter your company’s tagline — a comprehensive way to see if other areas of your business are receiving traction online, perhaps without giving credit to your business.
4. Get creative and create an alert limited to only “news” and/or “blog” sources using keywords about your industry — an easy way to read a daily or weekly digest about what peers in your industry are saying.
The goal is to become aware of everything as it happens, so you can boost positive mentions while the content is fresh, or do damage control quickly as necessary, too. You can customize frequency, sources, language, region, and how many mentions you’d like emailed to you.
A complaint about Google Alerts is that they don’t thoroughly cover social media mentions. There are several more social media-specific monitoring systems. Social Mention, Ice Rocket, Addict-o-Matic, How Sociable, Buffer for Business or Quintly are examples of these types of sites. They are either free, or have free sign-up or trial periods, with upgraded paid features.
Managing your brand’s media presence is an essential part of any public relations strategy — something I learned on a very grassroots level when sorting those newspaper clippings for political campaigns right out of college. Just as political candidates conduct “opposition research,” they often conduct a similar background investigation on themselves. Why not employ similar cyber-sleuthing skills to the benefit of your brand? With information comes power and the ability to design and execute a winning strategy.
Let us know how your cyber-stalking, I mean, cyber-sleuthing goes.
At Shift Key, we make communication capital. We are journalists who know how to create original content, the foundational layer of digital marketing. We understand audience and the information your audience wants — whether you are an agency, brand, company or non-profit. Content is the bedrock of digital marketing. Shift Key creates unique and informative content that feeds marketing activities across a mounting number of channels, generating buzz for brands and leads for products and services.