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

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• (9)How To Maintain a Professional Reputation Online
• (11)How Can You Find Out Who Is Googling You?
• (2)7 Tips For Effective Facebook People Search
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• (9)Top 5 Online Resources for the Citizen Journalist

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

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

• (6)How To Monitor What Is Being Said About You Online
• (9)Top 5 Online Resources for the Citizen Journalist
• (15)How To Control Search Engine Top Rankings for Your Name
• (2)7 Tips For Effective Facebook People Search
• (13)5 Powerful Ways To Google People From Alternative Search Engines

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.

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• (6)How To Monitor What Is Being Said About You Online

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!

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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

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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

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Don’t be deceived by the perception that everything you do online appears to be rather unreal or “in game”. All your traces will lead back to you. In the worst case scenario, people you least wish to spot your faults and failures will discover your “other side”. Read on if you’re worried or want to avoid mistakes in the future.

Why you should worry!

Every person with access to the internet knows search engines (e.g. Google) and search engines know you. Search engines naturally collect all the data they can get a hold of. And everyone who knows you may be interested in finding out more about you.

For example your boss or the company you would like to work for or your girlfriend or that stalker who has a crush on you. What are the things they should rather not know about you? Signing up for a dating website for example is harmless, unless your significant other finds out about it. Worried, yet?

How bad is it?

Ever googled your name or your eMail address? Instead of Google you may also try Spock, the people search engine. At Spock you can claim your own results, edit or improve your profile and monitor new information coming in.

So what do these searches reveal? Anything your family or a potential employer may find disturbing? Hopefully not!

Guard yourself!

What can you do to protect your privacy?

Set up an alternative disposable eMail address and use fake name generator to browse incognito. That way you can more or less anonymously engage in private activities that should not be discovered by the wrong people.

Obviously, if you’re using a public computer, make sure you erase all your traces, like cookies, browsing history, passwords, cache etc.

Don’t post intimidating pictures on social networks or anywhere else for that matter, you don’t know who may find them.

Generally, the safest way to stay out of trouble is to avoid trouble. Simply act like the sympathetic and professional person you wish to be perceived as. At least when you’re using your vital data.

Be searchable!

Rather than be completely under the radar and remove all personal information about yourself from the web, you should remain searchable! Because what would be more suspicious than fishy information? No information at all!

Take advantage of the system and do use your real name and your main eMail address in the right places. Make sure people will easily find good things when searching for you and don’t make them dig deep.

For example register a domain or sign up with a career website like Xing or LinkedIn. On these sites you can create the profile you want others to see. Feed it with honest facts about yourself and make connections that matter. Don’t be afraid to mention your private online projects, like websites, forums or blogs, if they are safe and may be relevant for a future career.

What to do when it’s too late?

If information has leaked into the World Wide Web that you would have liked to conceal, it’s almost too late. But you may be able to partially revert the leak and hide it. Is your eMail address pointing to an ugly forum? Go there and change your eMail address. Simply go ahead and tackle the search results one after the other and see what data you can change or remove.

Finally, hope that none of the details were cached. If it’s really bad you may want to hire professionals to help remove information from servers and databases.

Just in case your searches have revealed that someone writes libelous things about you, Ryan recently published a great article about How to Remove False Information about Yourself on the Internet. Good luck!

Need tips for browsing anonymously and removing your traces? Search the MUO article base for safer browsing and privacy.

Picture credits: barunpatro, Hardisty

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When you first go to the Monitter site you’ll see three columns that are constantly being updated in real-time with new occurrences of specified keywords. To get started you just simply type three words into the keyword text boxes. Withing seconds of entering your keywords, you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live. If you don’t feel like keeping a tab open within the site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the keyword(s) that you’re monitoring.

As tweets continue to stream in real-time, you have the option to reply to a tweet or go to the tweeter’s profile. The only downside to the reply feature though is that when clicked, it takes you to the Twitter homepage where you can then reply. In future updates, it would be nice to see a reply box integrated right on the Monitter website.

A great feature that Monitter has implemented is the ability to change back and forth from a light to a dark theme. When you visit the site the default theme is dark which a lot of users don’t like, so it’s nice that they have this option.

As you can see above next to the light/dark link, there’s also the option to hide the informational panel that appears above the columns. As you can see below, the header takes up quite a bit of space so it’s nice to be able to open and close it whenever you need to.

Lastly there’s the Monitter widget that you can embed on any site that allows javascript. In order to use it, you will need to download the necessary files and insert Monitter widget tags (as many as you’d like) on your site. The instructions consist of four short steps and are very simple. Below you’ll see a demo widget.

So now you have yet another way to spy and monitor the Twitter world to see what they’re saying about you, your blog and your keywords.

What do you think? Do you think Monitter is something that you might use on a regular basis?

Charnita is a social media addict & Internet junkie. She blogs about internet & blog tools, website & blog promotion, web 2.0 & social media at her Social Web Tools blog.

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Considering the huge information overflow online, you can have some excellent tools which help you to effectively organize the information flow and help you stay informed and up to date everyday. Let’s take a look at some of them.

1. RSS

RSS or feeds as we like to call them is an amazing technology which lets you stay updated with various websites, blogs and journals in one place – your feed reader – which could be Google Reader, FeedDemon or any other one. We at Make Use Of love RSS and have published lots of posts up to now for RSS addicts. Do a search for “RSS” in our search engine and you’ll get all of them.

Assuming that most of the readers of this site already know all about RSS, those who’ve heard this term for the first time today (yes, believe it or not, RSS hasn’t gone mainstream yet ) should start making use of this technology immediately.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the most useful services by Google, especially for those who care to stay informed online. Through Google Alerts you can monitor a specific term or phrase and check what people are saying about it. Read more about it here.

3. MonitorThis

MonitorThis is an effective online reputation management tool which lets you subscribe to 20 different search engine feeds at the same time, for a particular search term. It includes all the main search engines including Delicious tag search and Flickr tag search.

4. Memes

Memes on the internet aggregate the information which quickly spreads from one blog/website to the other and present them in a river of news format. There are various such meme websites, the most famous of them being Techmeme, which aggregates the latest tech news from around the web. There is also RSSmeme which aggregates what people are sharing in their RSS readers.

5. DailyMe

I wrote an elaborate post on DailyMe sometime back and I think that it’s certainly one of the best personalized news aggregators available online which also boasts some nice features like the newspaper reading format.

6. FaveBot

FaveBot works like Google Alerts and lets you track your favorite keywords online. It allows you to monitor through various categories like blogs, books, DVD’s, events, music , podcasts, pictures and videos.

7. Twitter And Friendfeed

Both Twitter and Friendfeed, apart from from being cool ways to communicate and be social, also serve as a way to get the latest information about various events and happenings from all around the world.

Twitter also has its own version of Google Alerts called TweetBeep which alerts you via email when someone mentions a keyword on Twitter which you’ve flagged for attention.

What online tools do you use to organize your information flow and stay informed and up to date? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog

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