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Tracking mentions of a particular keyword throughout the web is a daily activity of any online reputation manager. More often than not he is at his wits end with the number of alerts popping up increasing by the minute. The point is that Google Alerts is the most fundamental & a must-have for online reputation management. A rough overview of the Alerts service of Google is in order. Google Alerts has certain filtering parameters like the Type field in which you can specify the type of platform where you want to track the alert. The type specified can be News, Blogs, Discussion Forums, Videos or just about everything. You can tell the Alert crawler the frequency with which you want the alerts to be tracked, like instantaneously (as-it-happens) or once a day or week. There is an option which says that a user can instruct Google Alerts to show up “only the best results”. But they haven’t defined any set algorithm or rule to determine which mentions can be classified as “the best results”. The effectiveness of this filtering parameter is debatable because Google isn’t really evolved enough to decide what result is actually relevant to your business or brand. This sums up almost all the service that Google can possibly offer when it comes to online brand monitoring. So, can we safely say that we have tapped all the sources & platforms where our brand could find a mention or are even get discussed? Unfortunately, no! The largest generator of content on the web is left out. You cannot fault Google for that, for Facebook feeds cannot be crawled by Google, but in the bargain, online brand managers are losing out on a major chunk of workable data. People are generally less un-political in their rhetoric while talking to someone they know and tend to speak their mind. So the actual sentiment in the internet crowd can be only mapped when you engage in a one-on-one with the consumer. Google Alerts will help in getting the consumer to you, but there is a need for a service which will implement the reciprocal process. If search engine marketers could create a platform to reach out to their consumers, users will get a platform to voice their opinion on it and ensure that their grouse gets heard and addressed promptly. A lot of corporate reputation management professionals, while tracking the alerts have to access half-baked websites, spam links, or fake web pages. This makes it apparent that such platforms have been created with the sole purpose of negative publicity of some brand. The activity of tracking alerts is not refined and more often than not, the tracker ends spends the greater part of his time tracking irrelevant alerts. This issue can be brought to an end by introducing a single application where users can directly send their feedback to the brand manager and will be responded to promptly. This way we can channelize users and prevent them from posting on 3rd party sites, in the process make life miserable for the brand manager. It sounds a bit futuristic, but such a service will ensure a better customer experience & in the process showing the willingness of the brand to value its customer, even after he has bought a product. Some issues are inevitable with a big brand, but creating trust will surely help it tide over the difficulties that arise in the process of online brand management.
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Is Google Alerts Enough For Reputation Management?
