5 Feeds We Monitor for Clients

I like offering Reputation Management as a service, probably because it’s something that can really be used by thousands of companies and doesn’t require as much stress (usually) than services like SEO when things aren’t going your way. I use Google Reader to track a number of feeds for around 10 sites. Here’s how the monitoring tends to go:

• Login to Google Reader, star anything worth mentioning in an end of month report
• Look into detail at anything that looks serious / negative
• Report back the serious / negative to client if I think it deserves their attention
• Come up with ideas on how to respond to any criticism or issues that have been mentioned online

I did a post similar to this one about 4 months ago titled ‘5 Free Brand Monitoring Solutions‘ but today I’m looking at the actual types of feeds we monitor for clients and why (this isn’t everything we monitor) but should give you a decent insight for monitoring your own site or others.

1. Google BlogSearch “ClientName” / “Client Name”

This one is relatively obvious, Google Blogsearch is a technorati rival that monitors blogs and what they are writing online, you also find a few forums in there as well which is often a nice surprise. If I had a client named ‘Dirty Dishes’ I would simply do a query such as “Dirty Dishes” like this one. I make sure to sort that by date, and although that is pulling up a lot of poor results it’s something that can be refined in the future by removing sites that aren’t relevant with the -site: parameter.

2. Serph “ClientName” / “Client Name”

Serph is a little gem and if you aren’t using it already then you are missing out. It covers some blog search engines such as technorati but also looks into Youtube (this has been very beneficial), Digg and Delicious. Although it may pick up some similar results it’s definitely worth subscribing to this feed with your clients name in there as well.

3. Technorati “ClientName” / “Client Name”

Finally, just to cover all angles we also add Technorati into the mix aswell. I’m actually losing patience with Technorati as it’s results are going down hill and I’m getting much better reporting from the likes of Google Blogsearch. Nevertheless, we want to be watching as much of the web as possible so the extra time going through this feed is definitely worth it. How long I will keep this in the mix I’m unsure, it is still better for monitoring blog backlinks though as I noticed Google has been made the preferred choice in the new versions of Wordpress which I’m not too pleased about.

4. Digg Submitted “URL”

Now then, this one isn’t necessarily for clients that have asked for reputation management but clients looking for blog marketing / updating and then tracking how people are responding to their content. One of the best things to happen to a bloggers content is to make it onto the Digg homepage where it’s seen by a lot of people who have the ability to send backlinks to the article. Keeping an eye on this is also good in helping a story go popular and tracking whether the content has been ‘approved’ by the Digg community. Click the image for an example

5. Digg Hot “URL”

When you have a few clients that are pushing out 30+ articles per day, being major news sites, you find that a lot of their stories are submitted to these sites on a daily basis, that means it can be a pain tracking how well they actually did on the site. To keep that process even simpler (and make reporting easier) we also track if a story went hot on the site. This simply involves changing the search from All Stories to Front Page Stories as you can see on the image to the right.

There’s 5 feeds that we monitor, there is more but thats our ’secret sauce’. What do you monitor?