6 Free Tools for Online Reputation Management

If you’ve never Googled yourself before, you’re part of a very tiny minority.  On a personal level, tracking your online rep may just be a vanity thing (and perfectly normal, don’t worry) — but from a business point of view, it’s an absolute necessity. 

So if you aren’t keeping tabs on your company or brand’s “web-putation” the time to start is NOW, and i think you’ll find this article on MarketingProfs.com extremely helpful: 

Six Free Tools for Online Reputation Management by Dan Schawbel

As Schawbel very sensibly points out “Part of your brand is in the hands of others, so it’s critical that you monitor it before a flame becomes a forest fire.” You can also use all the feedback you finds part of your marketing strategy, to discover your audience and market to them directly.

The 6 monitoring tools he recommends are below (they’re explained more fully in the article).

1. Google - http://google.com/alerts 
2. Blog posts - http://technorati.com 
3. Blog comments - http://backtype.com
4. Discussion boards - http://boardtracker.com 
5. Twitter - http://search.twitter.com 
6. FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/search 

So there you go.. time to get cracking on the tracking! I hope you like what you find… If you don’t, it’s probably time to make some much-needed changes.