Google Alerts are a great way to keep track of brand names, products, services and people in the news. Google Alerts sifts through the news to find anything that matches the words or phrases you want to find.
Reputation Management
If you’re a large enough company with products and / or product brands, or you’re a business with a large presence, you might find that Google Alerts could help you keep track of any conversations where your company or brand names feature.
If you’re lucky, people are saying good things about you, which you could otherwise miss out on. On finding these praise-worthy news items, you can follow them up, thank the publishers and use those news items as testimonials, as well as using them within other marketing materials.
However, there’s also the possibility that people are saying bad things about you or your products. Here’s your chance to engage with those people directly and deal with those issues head on.
Tracking industry trends
As an example, I have Alerts sent to me for: “Social Media” and: “Social Networking”, which helps me keep abreast of changes and of new people, emerging technologies et cetera.
If you’re a marketeer, or a business that needs to track trends, you’ll find Google Alerts to be very useful and complimentary to your broader activities.
Once you’ve chosen what you want an alert for, you can have them delivered to you via email at different intervals, such as right away or as compendium once a week.
