Reputation control

Control Your Reputation Online

We know that whatever we do online, we leave traces. Some of those may be quite innocent, others might dampen your reputation, particularly if you hold a senior position with lots of publicity.We talked about such tools as Sucicide Machine a few months ago (http://hrboutique.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-electronic-resources-for-landing.html), and those are instances when it's up to you what appears on the web regarding your persona. Today's blog is about tracking other people's activity, if they mention anything able to affect your public image.

There are many free internet tool helping you to measure your activities in forums, blogs and social netwroks. Below are just a few of those. All of these will help you find out if you have been "naughty" or "nice" online and map out the strategy to rectify or reinforce what you have been doing:

• Google Alerts. After registering, you'll be getting an e-mail every time there is a comment published mentioning your name or brand.
• Twilert. The Twitter alert search will help you know instantly what is being said about your brand or whatever topics you might be interested in that network.
• Google Real Time and Social Mention. These two search engines have the advantage of providing you with real time information and are designed to filter the contents, which is published in social networks.
• Brandfo. It is the free service that monitors and provides information about what is being said about your brand or company, on the Net.
• ReputacionXL. Functions like Google Alerts: sends information to your e-mail.
• Whostalkin and SamePoint, Backtype and HowSociable. Four webservices specializing in searching for conversations about topics and brands in blogs and social networks.
• Xopie. It is another opinion search engine, but in this case those are delivered to you via a feeds reader (RSS).