FINDING OUT WHERE PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU ONLINE
The first step to finding out where the conversations of interest to you are happening online is compiling a list of sources. Next, compile a list of topics to search for (you might use standard keyword research to augment this): generally your brand, your competition, your products, and industry-specific topics. Then, conduct the searches and save the results. In many cases, you can set up alerts so that you are notified right away when a conversation is taking place.
You have many options for this process—from completely manual (and free) to engaging an expensive service that not only conducts the searches but analyzes the information and creates reports on it.
Following are some suggestions on where to start when embarking on this task manually.
- Use Google search. With Google advanced options, you can restrict searches to a specific timeframe (such as the past 24 hours) and can even search through only reviews or only discussion forums. You can also use Google Blog Search to search through only blogs and Google News to search through only news (Figure 9.5).
- Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts enables you to set up automated searches for news, blogs, video, groups, and Web search and have the results delivered via e-mail or RSS as they happen, once a day, ...
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