Why Monitoring Your Name is Important

Do you monitor your name if someone mentions it in a blog post? Whether you are an individual, company, nonprofit organization, or government agency, you’re keeping tabs on bloggers who write about you, right?
By means of example, if I didn’t ego surf my own name and links to my blog, I wouldn’t know that David […]

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Do you monitor your name if someone mentions it in a blog post? Whether you are an individual, company, nonprofit organization, or government agency, you’re keeping tabs on bloggers who write about you, right?

By means of example, if I didn’t ego surf my own name and links to my blog, I wouldn’t know that David Bradley credited me, techRepublican acknowledged me, Christopher Gabriel mentioned me, Marc Meyer linked to me, Ken Burbary applauded me, Justin Levy included me, Danny Brown positioned me, Meznor thanked me, Erika Napoletano called me out, MW referenced me, Victoria Webb appreciated me, Fred Wilson praised me, Tom Salemi saw the praise about me, Jason Alba profiled me, or most recently, Aaron Strout published me.

There are many web monitoring tools out there, but the simplest is the free Google Alerts tool.

By clicking that link, you are brought to a screen that enables you type in a word or phrase, select the type of media to search (websites, blogs, groups, video, etc.), and the frequency of alerts to arrive in your email inbox.

For instance, if your name is John Smith, you nickname is Johnny Smith, and you tweet as @JohnSmith, you could either create three separate search strings, or loop them together, e.g. “John Smith” OR “Johnny Smith” OR “JohnSmith”. If your website is JS.com, you could have a separate search for link:http://js.com. Any search strings enabled in Google Web Search or Google Blog Search are allowed in Google Alerts. Make sense?

If you’re not currently running ego searches, perhaps you’ve now seen the light?

Many social media consultants and community managers routinely search for their names, their corporate executives’ names, and their competitors’ names. At least, that’s my theory!

Let’s test the theory with Amber Naslund of Radian6, Marla Erwin of Whole Foods, Andrew Nystrom of the Los Angeles Times, Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross, Morgan Johnston of JetBlue, and Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research.

I’ve communicated with all of them, so it’s a 50-50 chance any of them might follow my blog and are tickled to read the entire post. It’s also a gamble if they are monitoring their personal or corporate names.

If you are one of the six named individuals, or are a colleague at said organizations, do you mind adding a comment below and indicating how you came here?

Photo credit: law_keven

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