Step by Step Guide to Monitoring Feeds for Reputation Management

If you know how to use an RSS Reader and know what free tools you should be using online to track important keywords then this post is probably not for you. If you would like to learn the basics then keep on reading. This post was created so I have something to refer too in terms of Reputation Management in its simplest form and to help people who are quite confused about this subject.

Monitoring is a large part of Online Reputation Management and is the process of tracking keywords related to staff, products or even service names to see who is talking about you online, as a live service.

For this guide we are just going to be using two general sites and explaining how you can track updates to them, if you want more details on feeds to use check out our post on ‘5 Feeds we Monitor for Clients‘.

Let’s Get Started

Step 1: Sign up to Google Reader

Google Reader is my preferred choice; some people like to use bloglines or even something like netvibes. If you decide you don’t like the feel of Google Reader after this tutorial then this guide will still help you with acquiring the feeds you need to add.

You should see a page similar to this after you have registered:

Step 2: Decide what you are going to track

Because this is more of a tutorial on how to do this instead of actually working out what to monitor (tips on that here) we are just going to look at general terms.

For you or your company this could be the name of your CEO, the name of your biggest product or monitoring response to a service you offer.

Step 3: Tracking Google Blogsearch

Now you have signed up to a feed reader and know what terms you want to monitor we can now look at actually tracking them. The first site we are going to use for this is Google Blogsearch.

Simply enter the terms you want to track, then we are going to get the URL of the RSS feed for that specific term. To do that just click on the RSS button as in the image below:

Step 5 in this guide will show you how to add this into Google Reader, just keep note of the URL for now.

Step 4: Tracking Technorati

Technorati is another blog search engine similar to Google Blogsearch. It tends to have less spam in the results from what I have seen so I like to use them both together.

Once again, simply enter the terms you want to monitor around the blogosphere and then do the search. You can then get the URL of the RSS feed to watch updates for this term as shown below:

Step 5: Adding feeds to Google Reader

If you have already clicked on those URL’s you might notice they look a little bit funny. That is because they are not supposed to be read with a browser but with a feed reader.

Going back into Google Reader, you should notice a box in green to the left which allows you to add a feed to track, click on that and you should see this:

Once you’ve done that, you should now see the feed in Google Reader with the latest items displayed at the top. You can mark all these as read and keep track of Google Reader on a daily basis to see who is talking about you, your brand or your products.

General Tips

• Searching for something in quotes if it’s more than one word helps eliminate irrelevant results
• You may also notice a small RSS icon () in the top right corner of your address bar which you can click on
• Other sites you can use to monitor mentions include OMGili, Serph and Keotag.

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