And now to a very sensitive issue – monitoring. As some of you know my profession is leading brands into the future of communication. One of the more important parts of this is teaching them how to keep track of their own brands in the jungle of conversation. What are people saying about my brand, where does the conversation take place and how can we respond to it – simple questions really.

However, quite many brands don’t have a clue on how to do this or even worse – they haven’t even started to think about tracking conversations related to their brands.

When I speak about this we often end up talking about me and how I track my own brand. I try to keep track of every conversation out there that in one way or another has my name or brand in it. As often as I can I also listen to, respond or in other ways take the conversation into account – just as any brand should.

One of my Netvibes dashboards that I use to monitor Ronnestam online

Since sharing is caring – here is how to track keywords online on a daily basis without paying for it. NOTE – this doesn’t give you a 100% guarantee and the more generic your brand is the harder it is to monitor it, then professional help might be your solution. It also applies better to smaller brands rather than large ones. But you will gain some control over what happens online in most open forums and it’s a start!

Follow these 21 steps to take gain some sort of control of where your brand might be mentioned online

1. First thing. Head over to Google Alerts and enter the keywords you want to monitor. This is the easy one.
2. Then do the same over at Socialmention Alerts. An easy one too. However, these first two ones are a little bit slow so continue reading.
3. Register an account on Netvibes.com and once your done keep that Internet browser window open.
4. Open one more window (press CTRL+N or CMD+N on a Mac)
5. In the new window, go to socialmention.com and perform a search on the keywords (for example the name of your brand) you want to track.
6. Once you have gotten your result. Look for the orange RSS icon in the top right corner.
   Click the RSS Feed icon.
7. Now select the link in your web browser and copy (press CTRL+C or CMD+C on a mac).
8. Switch back to the window where you have your new Netvibes.com page.
9. In the top, press new Tab and name it with the keyword you searched for.
10. In the top left, click the green button ‘Ad Content’ and choose Ad a Feed in the drop down menu.
11. Place your marker in the field that says ‘Enter a feed address or website URL for auto detection’ and paste (CTRL+V or CMD+V on a mac).
12. Press the button Add Feed besides your pasted link.
13. Now press the little green button that says ‘add’ and you search result will be displayed in the bottom field below the Tab that you just named.
14. Switch windows and perform the same search in Socialmention but this time click the tab Microblogs above the search field
15. Redo the entire process and you have added your next search.
16. Once you are done you should have searches in each and every area from the web.
17. Now Switch window back to the one with Social Mention and go to Icerocket.com
18. On Icerocket you will find the RSS results to the left.
19. Now perform the same process except for creating new tabs in Netvibes.
20. Once done, go to Twingly.com and perform the same searches on both Blogs and Microblogs.
21. Last thing to do. Go to the preferences of your internet browser and change your startpage to netvibes.com

Now you will at least know if there’s any shit written about your brand and you have the possibility to act.

And of course I do know that some of you might think this sounds scary but this is the world we live in and you should act in accordance.

I pointed my browser towards Twingly when I landed on an Error 500: Internal server error page. Once there I was greeted by this beautiful error message.

It’s funny how a little bit of humor makes you wanna come back…even though the service actually didn’t work. This is something many of the old companies definitely can learn from.

ps. What the heck does “G” stand for? Google?

I visited Twingly today to see the rating of my Whiskyblog when I noticed this little screensaver. Unfortunately it’s only available for PC users. But it seems like a pretty cool thing.

The Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.

For you guys and girls who haven’t heard about Twingly
Twingly is a spam-free, next-generation blog search engine, currently closed beta but soon to be available for everyone. And it’s made in Sweden. What I personally enjoy with Twingly is the fact that you can set up queries and then get that query and then subscribe to it in your favorite RSS reader. (Netvibes in my case). What I don’t enjoy is that the blog search indexes blogs way to slow, but that will hopefully get better.