Finding yourself - Tracking your brand online

So, you've researched and created a list of phrases identifying yourself and your company. In this second part of the series, it's time to start looking for mentions of yourself online. The most obvious idea, of course, is to plug them into a search engine and read the results. Because all search engines are not created equal, and some promote certain pages over others on different criteria, it's important to choose a range of engines to get a fair representation of your brands online. This doesn't mean you need to check every search engine out there, or page to position 1,167 on the ones you do - what you are trying to do is cover what the vast majority of what other people are going to see spoken about you. In practice, unless you are Apple or Coca-cola, search results become repeated across engines and relevancy falls quickly beyond the first few results pages.

Which engines to choose? Of course, the major players, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Then, their vertical searches, such as Google Blog Search, Google News, Yahoo News and MSNSearchNews. I have focused here on the news and blog searches because they are likely to carry fresh content relevant across a wide range of subjects. In this same line, Technorati and Icerocket also factor as aggregators of opinion from millions of blogs.

Search phrases, check. Search engines, check. All good to go? Unfortunately, you are now left with what is a chore - a daily visit to each search engine, entering each search phrase, to read the latest - which is usually mostly unchanged from yesterday and, even worse, containing duplicated results. There is, however, some help out there - Google for example offers Google Alerts, which sends you an email every day with any changes in the SERPs, and the similarly named GoogleAlerts.com is a commercial service offering an RSS feed of Google results. Other search engines allow you to download an feed of a particular search phrase directly, which helps by keeping all the results in one place and marking those results you have seen as read. This is a good sight better, and is the recommended way to do basic ORM tracking. It does however still suffer from the problem of duplicated pages. It also has one other problem - high maintenance when adjusting your phrases.

Adjusting phrases is an important part of getting your tracking setup perfect. Although skill comes with experience, it's impossible to know beforehand whether your search is too broad, or (more difficult) too narrow. If it's too broad, you will soon find yourself sifting through multitudes of irrelevant mentions on similarly named topics - it's time to start excluding these results with the minus (-) operator. For example, 'quirk newsletter -cars' excludes certain used car sales results from a search on the Quirk Newsletter. Too narrow searches will bring back too few results - start to worry when you don't pick up your own online press releases you can find in a Google search.

Refinement of phrases should be see as a continual, evolutionary process, as the search environment and the market changes. Changing a phrase across all the engines is a chore however, and here I have to stop for a moment to mention BrandsEye - it allows you to maintain and update a set of phrases independently to the set of search engines, and at the same time solves the problem of duplicate results which is a considerable time saver.

At this point you should have the ability to retrieve mentions on your phrases, which gives you a start at tracking your named brands. This alone is probably going to tell you a few things you didn't already know about what others are saying about you online, and provides entry points to join the conversation. Still, it's largely dependent on you to remember who is commenting and what they are saying in order to draw any useful information out of the results. That is where measurement comes in, and will be the topic of another post. Technorati Profile