Very good article here....
In Depth: Why you must keep track of your online profile: "
You might not realise it yet, but you're a brand. All this time you've been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you've been a brand all along. Who'd have thought it?
All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it and even advertising it.
Why is it important to think of yourself as a brand? Because as information about individuals becomes increasingly available online, you want to make sure that information is not only accurate but also positive and succinct.
For example, this weekend I arrived early to meet a friend at his friend's house. I didn't know this friend of a friend, so on my way there I Googled him. I found that I was already following him on Twitter and discovered his blog, the company he worked for, his Facebook page, his Flickr account and so on. In 10 minutes, I thought I had a pretty good profile of his interests (cats, anime, politics) and personality (funny, busybody).
However, if I'd been really committed, I could have found all sorts of information. Deep Googling of my own name threw up fan-fiction from a magazine forum I used to work on, as well as some gadget fanboys threatening violence against my person for underscoring one of their preferred devices five years ago.
It wouldn't be good for a future employer to see that as one of my main hits, but thanks to good profile management and search engine optimisation, it's buried deep in Google's archive.
What differentiates your brand from you, the person? Well, everything you do as a person can contribute to the brand, but it shouldn't necessarily. Many other people can contribute to the brand, too – sometimes unconsciously, sometimes negatively.
All the data and media that we're generating and adding to the internet and social networks is part of this database, and additions are increasingly automated (location tracking on Latitude or Gowalla, media tracking on LibraryThing, LoveFilm or Raptr) so there's a need for effective filters to reveal where important events have occurred and manage their impact.
Media and social monitoring is about tracking any brand across all media. Simply put, it's about making sure you hear everything important that people are saying about your brand, and filtering out the noise, the incorrect results and the homonyms so you can reach out to the positive and negative people out there – to reward the friendly and correct the unfriendly.
It can vary from simple, free tools such as Google Alerts to complicated expensive tools such as Radian6.
Egosurfing – the act of searching for your own name – is therefore little different to standard media monitoring. The only real difference is your lack of resources – most of us aren't going to spend our entire salary on a Nielsen BuzzMetrics subscription. Nor are we going to have the time or the staff to set up and maintain a complicated monitoring tool. We just need something quick and dirty to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Taking this into consideration, we've picked four products that enable you to track your online profile. We've had Radian6 recommended to us by no less than Microsoft's Internet Marketing department, so we've included it here even though it's high-end stuff.
Google Alerts is a no-brainer because it's free and simple. Finally, Social Mention and Trackur offer easy social media monitoring. There are several tools we would have liked to examine, but which were too niche for our deliberately wide-ranging test.
Technorati is an older tool that only rates blogs and uses a fairly arbitrary metric. Blog Pulse is similarly blog-focused, but more up-to-date. Board Reader, as you might guess, tracks message boards and forums. Scoutlabs and SM2 are similar to Radian6, but Scoutlabs is cheaper and lighter on features, whereas SM2 is more useful for PR and marketing. AlertRank sorts your Google Alerts for you and is also free, so we've included it under Google Alerts.
Almost all of these, and the products on test, output RSS feeds. Put these into a feed reader and you've got a bespoke social media tracker – if you're willing to take the time to configure it.
Finding your brand online is only the first step. Next you need to ensure that the results that come top are positive, that your own content comes first and that you have procedures in place to deal with crises or negative feedback. Profile management is just starting to grow in importance. It can't be long before a standardised metric is accepted by social media experts and, more importantly, HR departments, meaning that personal profile monitoring will be key to job applications.
Now is a good time to start shaping your profile so you can become the brand you want to be.
Radian6
Price: $500 (10,000 results), $1,000 (25,000 results), $1,500 (50,000 results) + $100 per user, per month.
Supplier:www.radian6.com
Two separate 'social media gurus' have recommended Radian6 to us. Getting hands-on with it is initially daunting; the highly polished interface makes it seem more complicated than it is.
Thankfully, no-one's allowed to even use it without a thorough demo, and there are video tutorials to further explain it all.
The heart of the tool is in its configurability. It allows you to set up keyword profiles, choosing languages, media types, regions and sources, and output the resulting data in a variety of colourful and useful ways. It also includes team management tools, so someone like Stephen Fry can identify problem content and assign it to someone else.
While this power is wonderful, it's not so necessary for smaller users, especially as the base price is so high and it takes so much time to configure and maintain. If you're a media personality, the power and flexibility of this are great – but it's not really useful for most individuals' purposes.
Verdict: 4/5
Google Alerts
Price: Free
Supplier:www.google.com/alerts
Google Alerts Egosurfing starts when you first type your name into a Google box and hit [Enter]. Google Alerts is just an automated version of that, and deceptively simple with it. You put your keyword in, and hit [Enter].
It then starts delivering digests of all the mentions of your keyword across the web. If you want to configure it further, you can specify the type of content you're tracking (blogs, video, groups and so on), the frequency of the emails you receive and how many results you get (a measly maximum of 50).
It's hard to detect a difference between the results this finds and those of Radian6, but it's the output tools that Radian6 throws up and the way it rates content for you that give it such a large edge (forgetting, for the moment, its huge cost).
Alerts has been mashed up to create AlertRank, a separate rating tool that sorts alerts before they hit your inbox, but it doesn't match the flexibility of the bigger products.
Google Alerts is free and comprehensive, but if you want more results or filtered results, look elsewhere.
Verdict: 3/5
Trackur Free
Price: Free (one search), $18 (five searches), $88 (25 searches), $197 (250 searches), $297 (unlimited searches).
Supplier:www.trackur.com
Claiming a 60-second set-up time, Trackur performs a similar search to Google Alerts from a keyword or search string. However, it's slightly more powerful, allowing non-exact matches, mandatory includes and excludes, domain exceptions and unlimited results (which can be seen as a graph).
Once you've run a search, you can export it to CSV, grab it as an RSS feed or get it through email. It also includes sentiment tracking, colour-coding the results by traffic lights so you can easily see which are positive and negative.
Sadly though, despite several searches for very famous names, we never saw any sentiment other than neutral. Trakur also limits you to one saved search per account.
If you want more, you must subscribe (or create duplicate accounts) which isn't particularly desirable, but not initially expensive either at $18 for five – though the costs can rise quickly if you get into setting up corporate accounts.
Verdict: 3/5
Social Mention
Price: Free
Supplier:www.socialmention.com
Like Trackur, Social Mention aggregates user-generated content. It also has the same ability to customise your search: you can select the type of content, the date and so on. It does everything Trackur does, and it's free for any number of searches.
Its sentiment tracking actually works and is useful, though you can't click through to see it. Social Mention breaks down the top keywords, users, hashtags, postrank and sources for each search and provides you with CSV data for all of them, as well as letting you sign up to alerts that are at least as good as Google Alerts. It even gives you some handy stats about how you're reaching out to your audience.
Finally, Social Mention produces more results than Trackur does (though not as many as Google or Radian6), can be integrated with your search bar and, though it doesn't let you save searches, allows you to export as many RSS feeds or email alerts as you like.
Combined with the fact that it's free, Social Mention is an easy winner here.
Verdict: 5/5
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(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
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