tool of the week: Google Alerts

As one of the public voices for your brand, you should stay up to date about what's being said about your brand outside of the channels you manage.

Helps you stay ahead of the curve.

I don’t know about you, but Google Reader can be overwhelming. So are all those mobile news apps and Twitter feeds from news stations.

Sites change their RSS feeds, I have to physically go in and check Reader each day for an update and I’m following sites, not topics. On Twitter - all the updates seem to go out at once and I usually miss something good.

Google Alerts makes life easier.

It’s delivered to my inbox (as frequent as you choose) and I can glance at the headlines. If there’s something that catches my eye – I check it out. None of this multiple clicking and weeding through headlines about something I don’t care about.

I’d love to call Google Alerts an “old PR” trick from my years as the manager of all media monitoring for my brand but it's not old enough in the PR world. The second my boss told me I was going to have to read the New York Times cover to cover each day as well as the NY dailies – I knew there had to be a better way. This was in 2008 – back before Huffington Post was considered a “reputable news source” and well before the Times began their pay wall.

Enter Google Alerts.

I set up an alert for my organization. I also set up one for the topics surrounding my brand - industry news, local news, govt news and even rival brands. Voila!

To set it up, all you need to do is enter the search terms (just like you were Googling it) and don’t forget to use Boolean qualifiers. Then select the frequency and confirm your email address.

Get on it.