The advent of Web 2.0 and activities like blogging and social networking have completely changed the way people communicate and interact.
This phenomenon was started by blogging when casual internet users discovered this amazing way to reveal their thoughts online and get feedback from anyone, anywhere. This started a new form of conversation between blogger and reader.
With twitter and friendfeed coming to the picture, online interaction itself has graduated to the next level. You don't need a blog to be part of the conversation; heck, you don't even need a computer. Grab a mobile device and you're on!
With so much happening online, it's important to keep a track of what people are saying about you and the topics you care about. Is your name or something associated with your name being mentioned in a complementary or critical manner? Even the corporate world has begun taking online reputation of candidates seriously. HR managers of many firms now do a Google/Facebook/LinkedIn search for a candidate's name before hiring them.
If you are one of those who cares about your online reputation, consider checking out these 6 tools that will help you research your name accurately and efficiently.
Google Alerts
Considering that Google is the most popular and also the best search engine online, Google Alerts definitely becomes an important way to stay up to date on what Google is indexing about you.
Like most of the Google tools, this is also a nice and simple tool which lets you enter queries (like your name), the type of alert (whether you want to search only specific sources like news items or blogs or a comprehensive search) and the frequency of the email updates (as it happens, once a day or once a week).
Here is an excellent Google Alerts tutorial which shows you how to make the most out of this simple alert service.
TweetBeep
If you still don't know about twitter then it's high time you get yourself acquainted with it. It's the hottest micro-blogging service available where people from different backgrounds interact together in a purely democratic environment. Guess what, even Britney Spears has started using twitter.
TweetBeep, as they mention, lets you keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company or just about anything on twitter. From my personal usage of this tool, I can say that it's quite effective in tracking and reporting the relevant tweets.
MonitorThis
MonitorThis is another simple but effective tool to monitor your online reputation. It basically helps you generate an OPML file which contains search feeds from various sites like Google Blogsearch, delicious, MSN, Yahoo News, Flickr and many other such sites.
You simply need to enter the term you want to monitor and hit 'make monitor opml' . Then copy whatever comes up in that big box and paste it to a notepad and save it. Now open your RSS reader and go to the import/export section. Import the OPML file you saved and there you go, you get a list of RSS feeds tracking the term you wanted them to track (like your name for example).
Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose
Social Media Fire Hose is a script written with Yahoo Pipes by Joseph Kingsley. The concept is somewhat similar to what MonitorThis does. The main difference being in the sites which both the tools track. As the name indicates, this tool is more geared towards the social media sites and tracks your name, brand or product across sites like digg, friendfeed, etc.
Like MonitorThis, you can generate a list of RSS feeds and it's much easier with this tool because you don't need to play with OPML files here. There is a 'Get as RSS' button under 'More Options' and it lets you directly subscribe to the list of feeds in your feed reader.
Trackur
Trackur is where online reputation monitoring gets deeper and more professional. It employs a sophisticated tracking mechanism and scours blogs, social media sites, news sites, video sites and also provides you with a full featured dashboard to explore further.
The tool comes with a free trial and has better plans starting at $18 a month.
Technorati
Technorati pioneered blog search and it's still a nice free tool to check out who's talking about you in the blogosphere. You can search your name or brand and then subscribe to the results using the RSS button. An advantage of using Technorati to track your reputation is that it indexes blog posts almost immediately after they are published.
So now that you know how to track your identity, are you going to going to be proactive or will you rely on some HR manager to tell you what they found?
Cheers,
Abhijeet
 | Tom Purves |
