5 tools for Free Reputation Management
Everyone wants to keep up with the digital conversation and know what people are saying about you through blogs and twitter. You need to be proactive in listening to conversations that are important to you.
There are three basic components of reputation management:
- Listening to the conversation (read this article!)
- Being proactive and highlighting your information with professional information (read profiles for professionals & executive URLs, personal domains)
- Getting involved in the conversation (check out executive branding & online reputation)
Before venturing into your effort, we need to identify a list of things you want to monitor. We don’t want to waste time or energy focusing on the wrong things. You can use the following short list to brainstorm and create your list of topics:
For people (yourself and others),
- First name, Last name
- FirstnameLastname (no spaces)
- LastnameFirstname (no spaces)
- First name, Last name, company
- First name, Last name, previous company
- First name, Last name, title
- First name, Last name, previous title
- First name, Last name, city
- First name, Last name, event (for event attendees/conferences)
For topics:
- Industry terms
- Your professional projects
- Industry news sources
- Conference and Tradeshow names
- Your clubs, organizations and charities
For businesses:
- Your business name
- The address of your business
- The name of your boss
- The name of your peers
- The name of your employees
- The names of important products
- The executives you want to create relationships with
- The top competitors in your industry
Once you have this list of important topics, we need to begin using it as a checklist to browse the web and clarify exactly what we want to do moving forward. Using the following five tools, set aside a bit of time on a regular schedule (daily, weekly, monthly) and keep in mind the information you come across. This information is going to sit on the “back burner” for a while as you begin to formulate a strategy for how you want to present yourself and interact with the new information, keeping in mind that we need to setup both short and long term goal.
With that in mind, start using the tools below.
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, twitter, videos… and presents it in a fast dashboard.
BENEFIT – Social Mention sifts through a tremendous amount of information. In the most basic form, the Social Mention dashboard gives users a quick insight to what people are talking about and also presents users with like-minded and related terms, along with a very basic idea of how a person/brand is doing online. Social Mention also has a FREE service for social media keywords alerts that can be setup for daily recaps of important topics.
Articles to read:
Addictomatic is the most user friendly “social search” site there is. In a matter of seconds, you are presented with results from dozens of services that mention what you are searching for.
BENEFIT – Brutally simple, yet effective. Addictomatic presents all results in small widget boxes that can be moved around, added to, or deleted. Once you have a keyword and format you like, you can save the URL and come back to your personal search results or even share them with friends. This functionality makes it incredibly easy to create a personal or business dashboard to start your day with. You can see a sample of one covering online reputation management here.
WhosTalkin is another platform for finding the latest buzz. WhosTalkin presents information in a simplistic, functional design that allows a viewer to browse hundreds of documents with a few quick seconds.
BENEFIT – Forget bells and whistles, WhosTalkin is a robust “data source” that tends to find information that other sites miss (including some premium enterprise ones) and it does so quickly and efficiently.
Google Alerts provides a fairly straight-forward and robust way to be kept up to date on topics Google finds and is important to you. While not always the best “live and instant” reporting tool, Google Alerts has the largest data repository of any search tool. 
BENEFIT – It is simple. It works with your Google ID, Google Profile and all the other Google tools/products. It is 100% free and is always receiving updates and functionality improvements thanks to Google’s massive developer team.
(DISCLOSURE: This is our free tool, which we think is pretty darn useful!)
In a nutshell, BuzzProfile helps manage your online reputation. It is a combination of resource articles on best practices, one-page guide sheets, and useful tools wrapped into a single offering.
BENEFIT – BuzzProfile gives you one-click access to Google Alerts with enhanced functionality, multiple options for finding useful information on niche search engines, and additional benefits to share specific pieces of information with your network to spotlight positive efforts and keep up to date with daily information.
Conclusion: hopefully you realize that these are just tools and an entry point to having a healthy online reputation. We encourage you to stop by and keep up to date with online conversations. You can find us on Twitter at @ceoreputation and @buzzprofile