Tracking Blog Topics with Technorati and Google Alerts

Blogs are a form of social media gaining speed and popularity; more and more people are using blogs to research and find information from peers rather than directly from businesses.  The reputation of a business, service or product can be made or broken based upon blog chatter.  Are you monitoring the blogosphere to see what is being said about your business or product?  If a business is on top of what is being said, then that business can respond professionally and quickly to stop any negative publicity that might be building before any serious or permanent damage is done.  Staying on top of your blog reputation and responding quickly and professionally to problems or negative comments will always help to make a business look smart and attuned to their current and potential customers.

There are many tools available to help monitor blog topics and stay ahead of the public relations curveball.  Technorati is an excellent blog search engine.  Once registered for an account at Technorati, you can sign up to receive information on any blog subject or topic of your choice through the extras section of your account with watchlists. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for your watchlists to have information downloaded to your computer as it becomes available.  Google Alerts is another great way to stay up-to-date on any information that pops up on the internet.  Through Google Alerts, you can sign up to receive emails about any subject matter you want to monitor.  Just be careful with both of these services to specify exactly what kind of information you want to receive.  If you choose to receive information for the general topic carpet cleaning, you may receive more information than you can possible process.  But if you subscribe to receive information about “Domingo Carpet Cleaning” and include quotations around your subject matter, you should receive only information that contains those exact words in that particular order, which should weed out a lot of unnecessary information.

Check it out, it’s a wise investment of your time and energy for the benefit of your business.