Advice & inspiration

Ten free tools to manage your personal brand online

Now, after you have finished the major overhaul of your Web presence with my tips from yesterday, the next important step is to listen to what others are saying about you, your site, and your company. Managing your personal brand is incredibly important these days, especially with the introduction of social media. Thankfully, there are many free tools that will do this for you and deliver the results right to your RSS reader and/or email account.

I first stumbled across this idea while conducting research for a masters paper on social philanthropy. Social media blogger Beth Kanter discussed the importance of non-profits listening to their community, and I realized that the same rules apply to anyone.

Thanks to her advice, I now track every comment, ping, tweet, re-post and any other online conversation related to II. This has been an invaluable resource for me as I have learned more about my readers, what interests them, and their opinions on my blog and particular posts. And thankfully, the majority of the feedback has been positive!

Below is a partial copy of “5 Free Tools for Personal Reputation Management.” I would recommend reading it in it’s entirety as I found it extremely useful. He also wrote an extended version with more tools at Mashable, so make sure to check out this article as well.

“Google – Google.com/alerts

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe through email and RSS. Many people use their RSS readers to view these alerts and PR agencies use alerts to track their campaigns. You can monitor a news story, keep current with your industry and competitors and see who is writing about you.

Blog posts – Technorati.com

If you have a blog, then you have to be on Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine in the world. Technorati tracks “blog reactions” or blogs that link to yours, upon registration. Search for your name on Technorati and subscribe to RSS alerts, so when someone blogs about you, you will find out.

Blog comments – backtype.com

Recently, a new service came out to solve the problem of monitoring blog comments. Think about it, someone can comment on you on a series of blogs, but if you only track posts, you’ll really miss out. BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your website, BackType attributes it to you.

Discussion boards – boardtracker.com

Aside from blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel when people can gather in a community and talk about YOU. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information they viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.

Twitter – search.twitter.com

Twitter messages (tweets) move at the speed of light and if you don’t catch them, they will spread like a viral. Using Twitter search you can locate any instances of your name and either tweet back or remain silent.”

Other listening tools that Beth Kanter and Dan Schawbel recommend are:
Blogpulse
Socialmention
Boardreader
YackTrack
FriendFeed

I personally have google alerts emailed to me weekly with mentions of my name and Innovative Interactivity. I then track whether people steal my content without attribution with FairShare, and view blog mentions with Google Blog Search. The best part about it is that once I set these up, there has been no maintenance or upkeep!

Another great aspect of listening is that it doesn’t take a lot of time. You don’t have to do it daily (unless you are paranoid), and you don’t have to use EVERY tool listed above to make it worth while. So, pick a few to start and see how you like it. Also, let me know if there are others out there that I should be aware of as I am still learning as well!

Other posts that might interest you:

• CPOY judges review multimedia winners
• Top ten “how-to” guides for web developers and multimedia enthusiasts
• 10 must-read blog posts to catch up from the holidays

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