There are quite a few excellent reputation monitoring tools out there, but what do you do if you are looking for a little more sophistication than Google Alerts, but if you aren’t quite ready to pay a monthly fee for a specially programmed piece of software? Setting up a reputation dashboard is actually pretty easy. I have given references before on how to do this, but in response to a whole bevy of requests, I thought I would lay it out step by step.
A reputation dashboard is simply a customised RSS Reader with some targeted feeds. You can either run it within your current RSS Reader or, as we do, set up a reader account specifically.
1. Set up an account with RSS Reader
Netvibes is excellent because it actually allows you to lay out the results in a ‘dashboard-like’ interface. But there is nothing stopping you using Google Reader, Bloglines or any other reader which allows you to group feeds into a folder (or in the case of Netvibes, within a tab).
2. Add specific feeds for blog searches to a folder/tab within your reader
There are a lot of sites out there, but in order to cover most things, you should acquire customised feeds from the following:
Technorati
Icerocket
Google News
Digg
Google Blogsearch
Yahoo News Search
It is also wise to follow discussion boards to, so set up customised feeds from:
Boardreader
Boardtracker
Omgili
3. You can then add tag based feeds for those sites which don’t allow customised search feeds
These include:
YouTube
Delicious
4. Then…Start seeing what people say about you…
I know. That sounds a little simple, doesn’t it? It really isn’t difficult, but just to make it really clear, let’s walk through an example of acquiring a specific, customised RSS feed…
Lets say, for argument’s sake, your name is Reginald Fahrquarsson.
Go to Technorati, and in the top right corner there is a search box. Now, Technorati (along with Omgili, Google News, and many of the others) allows you to do an advanced search. This generally permits you to search for an ‘exact phrase’, or omit words from your search. The more specific you make your search, the more accurate your search results are going to be, so it is better to use the advanced feature for your search where you can.
So in our example, we are going to look for the exact phrase of Reginald Fahrquarsson.
When you click “search”, you should come up with a list of results which contain the phrase Reginald Fahrquarsson somewhere within them.
Somewhere on that page (in Technorati it is at the top) you will find the RSS symbol or the word “subscribe”. Click on this.
This will provide you with your customised RSS feed address. It is the address you need to add to your RSS reader. By copying the feed address from your address bar and adding it as a subscription to your reader, you are essentially subscribing to your own personalised search.
Repeat this with all of the other sites listed and you will have created a pretty comprehensive and absolutely free reputation monitoring dashboard.
You can also set up searches for your company or brand name and significant keywords within your industry. It certainly saves going to each of these sites and checking every day!
Thank you to cobalt123 for the image
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