If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you might already have read a few posts on how to monitor your brand. You might even have set up a Google Alerts as explained in this post by my fellow writer Meg Guiseppi. In her post Meg explains very well what you should monitor (I would also like to add former employers, colleagues and clients to the list) and she has a good list of what to do with it.
What I have noticed, along with quite a few other bloggers, is that Google Alerts misses a lot of local results. Also, it returns quite a few older results that are irrelevant due to being outdated. In a time when we get flooded with information, this can be really annoying. Another drawback with Google Alerts is that you have to add keywords one by one which makes it hard to manage when you add a lot of keywords.
There are a few options out there that I think do a better job, such as SocialMention for social media, Google Blogsearch for blogs etc. where you can set up RSS-feeds and monitor your search results. This is better than Google Alerts in the sense that it gives better results, but it is even harder to manage multiple search words when doing it in different channels.
For this reason we have developed Rynge Media Monitor (currently in beta). I would like to invite the readers of this blog to try it out. Just sign up for a beta account and within a few days you will be given access to the system. It is easy to manage; you can set up a feed for each interest area (eg. My brands or My former employers) and in each feed you can enter the keywords you´d like to monitor. The result will be presented in a feed that you can add to your favorites RSS-reader. However, I recommend using Google Reader since it is set up for easy sharing of interesting results.
Please let me know your experiences with monitoring your brands and other key words and also how we can improve the Rynge Media Monitor to be even more useful to the users. Thanks!
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Ola Rynge is an entrepreneur with a passion for the personal development side of personal branding (covered in this blog) as well as the application of personal branding and social media for entrepreneurs and small businesses (covered in The Rynge Blog).
His company, The Rynge Group specializes in market oriented small business and idea development, including social media strategies and implementations.
