But when the Internet came along, the ability to control what people said and thought about you was drastically diminished.  As search engines got better at finding things and blogging and social networks became more common, it got easier for people to express an opinion and even easier to plant a false rumour.  And we all know how difficult it is to reverse the damage of a false rumour once it gets out onto the World Wide Web.  Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

Our infographic today comes from KBSD and shows the various methods which you can use to control your “e-reputation” and why it is essential that you take this subject very seriously.  A growing number of employers are now checking applicants online for any indications of unprofessionalism or trouble.  Even your current employer may be keeping tabs on you and posting your drunken photos from Saturday night on Facebook (for example) is not going to help your future promotion prospects.

Let us know in the comments below what steps you’ve taken to secure and / or improve your e-reputation.  Have you managed to repair a bad e-reputation and if so, how did you do it?

Source : KBSD
Image Source : Kazamatsuri

One of the best tools to listen to online conversations is Twitter and here are a few actionable suggestions.

How Do You Create Twitter Feeds?

Despite the fact that Twitter has weirdly removed the direct option to grab the RSS feed of any search, all the RSS links are still working.

To create an RSS feed, add your search query after this URL string:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=

For example:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=cool software
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=”cool software” (for exact match)

There’s also a simple web-based app to generate Twitter search RSS links:
http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/

Here are a few useful tips we have previously covered on having fun with RSS feeds, which you are likely to find useful for using the search tricks listed in this article:

• How RSS feeds work in simple terms
• Best free RSS readers for the iPad
• How to mix and edit existing RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes
• Two easy tips to manage your unread RSS feeds better
• How to read RSS feeds on your iPad even when you’re offline

And now the actual tips on creating useful RSS feeds to track you and your business mentions on Twitter!

1. Reduce Any Clutter: Filter Out Retweets

While retweeting is great for expanding the reach of the update, retweets are actually one and the same message repeated again and again. Seeing multiple retweeted messages in your personal reputation management feed may result in one important update getting lost in the clutter.

Luckily Twitter search supports the – operator that lets you filter out all the updates containing a specific word from the search results:

["You (brand) name" -rt]

Example

2. Monitor Only Real Opinions: Filter Out Links

Let’s face it: most Twitter updates are aimed to share a link. If you blog a lot, your name (or moniker) is mostly mentioned on Twitter next to the post you have written. But do you want to only monitor “real” conversations?

Here’s a good way: Twitter supports the filter:links operator that searches only for tweets containing links. If we use the above mentioned trick, we’ll make it work vice versa excluding all linked updates from search results.

["You (brand) name" -filter:links]

Example

Similarly, you can also filter all updates referencing your Twitter username (you will be updated about these by Twitter itself via email or by your Twitter client):

[-from:username] – filters out all tweets coming from a user;

[-@username] – filters out all tweets referencing a user.

Example

3. Monitor Negative Mentions

This tip is especially useful for e-commerce site owners and geeky customer support managers. You can focus on negative mentions by including in the results.

["You (brand) name" ]

Example

4. Monitor Questions Mentioning You Or Your Business

Another great tip for service owners: you can create a separate feed to monitor all questions about you or your business name.

["Your (brand) name" ?] – make sure to use a space before the question mark.

Example

5. Include Your Name & Your Moniker(s) In Search Results

Lastly, here’s the easiest tip: you are most likely to be known by several names online: your name, username, site name, etc. You can include all these mentions in search results using OR operator:

["You business name" OR "Your name" OR "Your moniker]

Example

Are you tracking your name mentions on Twitter! I hope I have inspired you to! Please let me know your thoughts!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by krossbow

People could be spreading information about you or your business that you should rather be aware of. Rather than to regularly scan the search engines for results with your name, you can automate the process of monitoring your online reputation and be notified once there is a new entry containing your name. This will also work for any other subject that is of interest to you.

In this article I will introduce three services that allow you to monitor your online reputation and set up alerts for specific topics.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts provides updates of the latest Google results relevant to your search query across Google (comprehensive) or within different categories, such as news or blogs. You can choose to receive updates as-it-happens, once a day or once a week. They are subsequently delivered to your email or you can set up a personalized feed.

To receive email updates you do not have to sign up with Google. However, as a subscribed member you can centrally manage all your alerts about your online reputation.

As you can see from the example above, I have used some standard search engine operands. You can use these signs and keys to get more specific search results. So for example “Keane AND Berlin” will only return results from indexed sites that contain both keywords. A while ago I wrote an article on Google operands, which may come in handy now.

Trackle

Trackle is a service dedicated to tracking your personalized information online. To receive updates, you must sign up with your email address and password. It’s quick and simple. Once you’re in, Trackle offers many more features than Google Alerts. First of all, you can receive updates via the web portal, email, SMS, or through your feed reader.

The biggest difference between Trackle and Google Alerts is that Trackle has a lot more entertainment value. They have prepared search queries, known as Tracklets, and made them available through their Tracklet catalog. The categories include books, health, people, and travel. You can browse the catalog and add any of the Tracklets to your subscriptions.

To set up a custom search, type in your query into the text field in the top right that says “Research company, person, product, or topic“. It will direct you to a page with results from the past three days, like the one shown in the screenshot below.

From that page you can further select the types of results you’re after, for example narrow your results by credibility, select categories, and discover other users with similar interests.

Once happy with your definitions, click “Track this search” to enter the next step in which you define how the results are delivered to you. The search can be run every hour, every 4 or 8 hours, and once a day. Moreover, your search will not be executed forever, you can select a duration of up to four weeks.

Your inbox shows the latest alerts and within your subscriptions you can see what you’re tracking and eventually update it.

Other interesting features of Trackle include a widget for your website or blog or the option to create a custom newsletter.

Social Mention

Another way to receive a quick overview of your popularity or impact in the social media world is Social Mention. You can search blogs, bookmarks, comments, videos, a lot more or simply everything.

The results page provides a detailed analysis of the query. If the coverage is too broad, you can narrow down your search by specifying details in the advanced search.

The data can be downloaded as a CSV/Excel sheet and you can subscribe to alerts via email or RSS feed.

If you found this information helpful for managing your online reputation, you may also be interested in the following articles from Saikat:

10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer
Topikality – Improve Google Alerts & Get The Articles You Want

How do you keep up to date with what’s being published online?

Image credits: buzzybee

Using Google AdWords, you may find out the global monthly search volume for your name or relevant keywords that are being searched together with your name. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about the person Googling you.

And how do you know whether it’s really you they are looking for?

The truth is you can’t legally find out exactly who is using a search engine to look up information about you. However, you can find out when and where someone is searching for you. To obtain this information, you have to set up a trap. In other words, let yourself be found. Here, I’ll introduce 3 sites that will help you find out when someone is searching for you online.

All of these sites work by placing your profile high up in search engine results. So your respective profile will be one of the first hits people will see when searching for your name. And once someone clicks through, you will receive an eMail alert. Their IP address will reveal where the search originated from and the search term they used may tell you who they are or why they are looking for you.

Ziggs

At Ziggs, you can set up a full profile and market yourself. You can share your biography, write about your background, and upload your resume. After some time, your profile will be indexed by search engines and people will find you.

Once someone clicks the link to your profile, you will receive an eMail alert. The eMail will tell you when your profile was searched, where the search originated from (based on IP address), and which keywords were used to find you.

Another page quite similar to LinkedIn and Ziggs, which will alert you when your profile is being viewed, is Naymz.

WikiWorldBook

WikiWorldBook works very similar to Ziggs. The difference is that it’s really just an online address book. You can choose to hide all your contact details and let them contact you through WikiWorldBook only. People searching for you can still get in touch with you very easily, without signing up.

You can enter an array of contact information, social links, and a few details about yourself. You can also fetch a contact button from their site and place it onto your website or social profile. If someone sends you a message through WikiWorldBook, it will be forwarded to your eMail address.

Here is a short video demonstrating how it works:

Academia.edu

This site is targeted towards people who work in research and/or academia.

It not only allows you to find people with similar research interests and keep track of the latest developments in your research area, you can also set up your own profile and be notified once someone views it.

Besides writing about yourself and defining your research interests, you can upload your publications, review papers or books you have read, and update your status. A category called Keywords lists all the search queries that were used to find your profile.

So, did you Google your name and find weird results? Don’t feel safe just because you only found someone who carries your name. They could still ruin your reputation. Also, if a potential employer cannot find you on Google at all, it may not be to your advantage!

If you’re worried about your online reputation, do something about it. The following two articles will show you how:

John McClain showed How To Control Search Engine Top Rankings for Your Name and I explained How To Maintain a Professional Profile Online.

What are your biggest online sins that Google may reveal?

Image credit: cobrasoft

In this article, Mahendra shows you how you can integrate Twitter into your Powerpoint presentation and receive instant feedback. Steven has written about using hashtags effectively. And also, you can learn more about Twitter Lists to follow people more closely.

But to be more innovative in the use of Twitter for a business setting, here are 10 useful tips.

1. Expand Your Network

Using Twitter, you can join topic groups related to your business and career and gain valuable information from scanning others’ tweets. Your company will gain new customers and potential partners. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow the users.

Anyone can use Twitter to build a personal brand. Your customers and prospective clients will perceive you as an approachable social personality. Twitter is designed to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits.

2. Share Expertise To Build Credibility

If you hold free workshops, seminars or web meetings; let people know that it’s starting soon, how to participate and join in by tweeting about it. You can also link to your presentations and videos. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to your events.

Offer solutions to those who are struggling with something in your field of expertise. Share your ideas internally in a very efficient manner and broadcast links and headlines that can drive traffic to your website.

3. Highlight What’s Special

Twitter allows you to share the latest news and events related to your business in 140 characters. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. You can use this free platform to inform event participants and highlight what’s special. Sharing valuable information and useful tips helps you build a strong web presence and gain visibility on the Internet.

4. Look For Leads On Twitter

Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. You can share information that is useful for prospective clients or employers to enhance your reputation. Avoid hard-sell tactics: focus on building relationships. Don’t be afraid to take full advantage of Twitter and gather information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about your business.

Don’t think of what you can get, but rather what you can learn and what you can offer. Use free applications like Mr. Tweet to check your profile and finds relevant connections for you.

5. Communicate With Employees

Twitter is a great collaboration tool, which can be successfully used to save time and money. Forget about sending endless emails and calls – you can rather release short tweets to your team members describing what you have to say. Share what you’re doing so people learn about the type of work you do.

6. Run Special Deals & Promotions

Offer incentives to those who follow you on Twitter. You can give them free coupons, discounts, package deals and samples. Twitter is a great way to create interest and secure attendees.

Social networking is excellent for those who want to promote products, services and ideas directly to a target audience. Twitter marketing is a task that involves two-way audience engagement.

7. Receive Customer Complaints

By accepting customer complaints in the open, other consumers can see what kind of company you really are. Twitter allows you to respond quickly to shut down any impending service or complaint received. Communicate effectively with each of your clients and ask for their honest opinion. Make your goals public to compel you to reach them.

8. Interact With Your Competition

You can read the tweets of your competitors daily and stay in touch with them. Although this rarely happens in the real world, Twitter has changed it all. This free platform allows you to follow companies, experts, leaders and competitors in your industry. It’s not enough to monitor the latest projects released by your competitors. Tracking their mistakes is even more useful, because you can analyze their moves and see what exactly went wrong.

9. Organize A Local Tweetup

Twitter can help you organize meetups. All you have to do is to send a message announcing the time and place of the meeting. It’s an informal and effective way of planning a meeting. You can get in touch with vendors, suppliers and other people with whom you can form partnerships.

10. Create Brand Loyalty

With Twitter, you can always stay in touch with your followers. All these people are potential customers, so you must help them get used to your products and services. Participate actively to conversations and tweet constantly. This way, increasingly more people will find out about your business, while you will gain loyal clients.

Using Twitter for business, you can convert conversations into actions. A fresh and interesting personality attracts followers. Share information that is helpful for potential customers or employers to gain recognition.

Do you use Twitter for your business? Have you any Twitter tips to effectively reach out to your customers and business partners? Share them in the comments.

It is a cool new “Relationship Manager” that recently launched publicly in beta. Gist is not for casual users, rather, it’s a one-of-its-kind service for professional users that bridges key gaps between other popular services. For personal use, you should checkout Life.IO.

What is Gist?

Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you.

Get Started By Connecting Accounts

Gist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn’t connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.

Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let’s look at the powerful views Gist offers.

Dashboard View

The Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.

You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you’ve recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links.

You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an “intelligent reader” to being a “intelligent networking” tool.

People and Companies View

The People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.

You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.

Profile View

Gist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you’re not using it.

The What’s New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term.

Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn’t have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person.

Optimize To Get The Most Out Of Gist

After initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:

• Gist may not recognize that the person from your LinkedIn network and your friend on Facebook are the same person. In these cases, you will need to Merge them.
• Similarly, Gist may not correctly associate Twitter handles with the contacts from your email inbox.
• Gmail has a rather unconventional approach of adding every email address you send email to, as a contact. To my dismay, this doesn’t work well with Gist, which imports all Gmail contacts. I ended up deleting tons of frivolous help@”¦, support@”¦, and info@”¦ kind of “contacts”.
• You may not have had much interaction with influential people who are actually important to you. It appears that Gist’s ranking uses frequency of communication as a benchmark to assess importance, because of which you may need to manually adjust their importance.
• If your Facebook friends are primarily personal friends who work at companies that don’t really matter to you, you will need to either delete or lower their importance in Gist.
• Also, profiles may need to be edited to add individual websites, blog feeds and news sources so that you get relevant information.

Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us in the comments!

Realizing this, a few great applications have come out of the woodwork to make Twitter into a better way to have and follow a conversation. They thread tweets, track replies, and make sure you can understand the whole dialog, rather than just one small and insignificant part.

Here are three of the best ways to keep conversations under control on Twitter:

Twitoaster

Twitoaster is probably the easiest of the bunch to get started with ““ all you have to do is follow @twitoaster on Twitter. Then, Twitoaster goes to work for you. Every time someone responds to one of your tweets, the conversation is threaded on Twitoaster. You can see the number of replies (a number that’s frequently updated) to a given tweet, as well as see what people said. You can also log in to your Twitter account on Twitoaster, which lets you reply to your replies right from within the conversation.

Twitoaster also offers a couple of cool features ““ it tracks the number of replies a given account gets, as well as how you rank among Twitoaster users. It’s a full-featured way to track replies, as well as see who’s responding to your tweets.

Tweetree

Tweetree is really two great services in one ““ it creates conversation threads for replies, and it’s a total overhaul and improvement on the Twitter interface. First, the interface. Tweetree allows you to pull in external content ““ videos, images, and the like ““ and experience it directly within Tweetree. It also takes all shortened URLs, and shows where they actually go ““ a nice touch to avoid RickRolls and the like.

The conversation threading, too, is a great feature of Tweetree. It brings in all conversations you’re a part of on Twitter (even showing the tweets you replied to), and puts them in tree form, nesting the replies throughout the conversation. If you’re getting the “oh, how cool” tweets a lot, or replied about something you can’t remember for the life of you, Tweetree keeps track of it for you. You can do everything in Tweetree you’d want to do in Twitter, and actually a whole lot more.

ThreadedTweets

ThreadedTweets rocks the world of real-time conversation threading. You can sign up for ThreadedTweets without having to give your Twitter password, because it uses Twitter’s OAuth system to authenticate, rather than asking for your password. Once you’re signed in, you’ll get real-time monitoring of all the replies to your tweets, which are threaded into a conversation for you.

ThreadedTweets also keeps a list of Popular conversations, which you can read and view easily. Every conversation has a permalink, which makes it even easier to keep monitored and updated. There’s even an embeddable widget for tracking a conversation on another site ““ this makes ThreadedTweets both a conversation tool and a real-time search, which is a great combination.

One of Twitter’s best features is its ability to create quick, simple conversations. Twitter itself does a poor job of tracking them and keeping conversations intact, but these four applications do it incredibly well. What’s your favorite way to keep track of your conversations on Twitter?

Oh and make sure to follow MakeUseOf on Twitter as well. We are now going to start using for distributing beta invites to publicly closed websites and giveaway license keys to commercial software (when available).

Photo: respres

People share thoughts, exchange opinions and reviews every single second. It is really hard to keep track of those conversations and sometimes you just need to.

Would you like to know what people are saying about the recent product or track your business reviews? This time I am listing most useful online tools that might help you to search multiple social media sites from one place (and sometimes with one click).

Spy

Spy (see MakeUseOf review of Spy) is fun to use. It updates in real time and if you are tired of working, you can just sit back and read the updates.

The tool also shows recent trends (as well as hashtags) and allows you to change the page background color:

SamePoint

SamePoint offers to search plenty of social networks. It has a handy interface allowing you to click through the tabs to get more targeted results: social media, microblogging, networks, images, etc. You can also subscribe to any search by RSS to track any changes.

It also offers real time tracking mode:

SocialMention

SocialMention (see MakeUseOf review of SocialMention) offers to search through blogs (WordPress.com, Google Blog Search, Live.com, Technorati.com, Wikio.com), bookmarks (Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon), micro-blogs, comments (BackType), images (Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket), news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx), video (Youtube, Truveo.com, Pixsy.com), etc:

It also scores each query based on its social media presence:

WhosTalkin

WhosTalkin is the most comprehensive of all. It is divided into sections that includes blogs, news, networks, videos, images, and forums. Each of the sections has numerous options to click through.

The site also offers to install their Google gadget to bring the power of the social media search to your Google home page.

Of course, there are more social media search tools. I’ve only mentioned those that appeared useful to me.  Which tools are you using and would like to recommend?

Post image by striatic