Free Online Monitoring Tools for Online Reputation Management Part 1
A large part of online reputation management is ensuring you are keeping up to date about what is said on the web about your company. Of course, the web is no small network of sites so manually doing this would be a difficult task and require regular (and extensive) various searches on Google to check what is being said about your brand. But luckily there are some (free + paid) tools that do the bulk of the work for you and monitor & search the web for mentions of your brand name(s).
Google Alerts
One of the greatest, most well known and probably most well used tools is Google's Alerts. Google has thousands of computer servers scanning the web for new content for its search engine and you can set it up so when it finds new (or updated) pages about a certain topic (keyword), it emails you.
You can select to have it email you as it finds things, or daily/weekly digests. Generally it will find most things that are posted. But given the size of the web it can't find everything so it is recommended to rely upon other tools to monitor keywords on the web.
Backtype
As of the time of writing (Sept 2011) Backtype is being acquired by Twitter, so this may change for better or for worse. But at the moment you can use it to search Twitter for your company mentions. They index a massive part of Twitter and if your company URL, twitter account or hash tag is mentioned you can be sure to find it via backtype.
Monitter
This is another tool that works with Twitter - Monitter. Enter your keyword (e.g. your company name) and it gives you a real time feed that continuously updates of the latest tweets mentioning that word. This can be very handy if there are lots of mentions for your company every day. If there are only a few mentions a day, not so much.
BoardTracker
Rather than search the usual social networking sites, Board Tracker tries to index and search as many forums and message boards as possible. You can search by keyword and it searches it massive database of posts. You can set up email alerts too.
