I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, because we’ve been making a lot of changes to the company and sites. The first big change is turning AlertRank into a free site. The site still supports up to 1,000 search terms per account, and you are free to create any number of accounts. Alerts are delivered by email with a full set of ranking information as soon as they are received from Google, and you can also get them summarized daily in Excel or PDF format. My favorite feature is auto-tweeting the highest ranked alerts to Twitter. Since you can create multiple AlertRank accounts, you can have different Google Alerts search terms go to different Twitter accounts. It is a great marketing tool.
We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.
4 Days ago
People are always asking how to get their site listed in Google Alerts. The answer is simple, just comment on those sites that you find with Google Alerts. Google doesn’t send alerts for every mention of a search term. It only delivers results from sources it considers authoritative for these words. It isn’t as simple as PageRank, since that is a measurement of the site’s overall influence. You can get alerts from sites with a wide range of PageRank, but they all are sites that Google feels are important for that specific search term.
All you have to do is follow Google’s advice and focus your blog commenting on those sites that you get in Google Alerts. If Google sees links to your pages from these sites, it will assume that you too are authoritative for these keywords. Repeat this often enough, and soon you’ll also be showing up in Google Alerts.
3 Weeks ago
It is part of my job to read blog mentions of Google Alerts all day, and the same message keeps getting repeated: “Be sure to set up Google Alerts for your company and product names.” Sure that is important, but are you missing the most important part of the online conversation this way? When you meet people do you wait until they ask a question that is specifically about you before you say anything? Hopefully not. You need to listen to what people are interested in, and *join* them on this common ground. That’s the difference between a conversation and a response.
The same thing applies to social media monitoring with Google Alerts. Along with tracking your company and product names, you should also have alerts for any common terms in your industry, and breaking news events that will affect your customers. These will give you the opportunity to be a participant in social media, rather than being just an observer.
3 Weeks ago
I started a public Google Alerts account for Merrick Alpert the day he announced that he was running against Connecticut’s Senator Chris Dodd in the Democratic primary. Since then it doesn’t look like he is generating a lot of attention. This is a comparison of overall mentions of Dodd vs. Alpert on the AlertRank analytics page.
Alpert got a good bounce when he announced, but his rate of mentions have declined since, and the last week has been pretty much flatlined. I plan on exploring Alpert’s current online visibility, and putting together a plan for generating a little more buzz. This will take more work than I can cover in one blog post, so I’m going to make this my focus for the rest of this week.
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the overall picture. The analytics page displays a summary of the total and daily average rate of mentions for all the current Google Alerts in this account. By clicking the total mention column, we can order them from highest to lowest to see how Dodd mentions compare to those for Alpert.
It looks like Dodd is getting about 5 times more mentions each than Alpert, So there is a lot of work to be done. In the next post we’ll analyze the sources of these alerts and see if there are some good sites for the Alpert people to run a commenting campaign.
3 Weeks ago
It’s been 2 months since I started testing the idea of automatically sending selected Google Alerts to a Twitter account, and the results are pretty remarkable. The Twitter account for @marketing_alert has attracted over 1,500 followers.
When I created the account, I deliberately made it as clear as possible that this was an automatic process, and not a real human running the account. I used the default avatar, used an account name that explained the purpose, followed nobody from this account, and stated in the bio that the tweets were automatic. I’m sure that if I had adopted a persona by using the name and picture of a real person, the number of followers would have been much greater.
So what is the value of this experiment? It shows that by simply auto-tweeting about a specific subject you can attract followers interested in learning more. 1,570 followers may not seem like much compared to the millions promised by the various pyramid schemes being promoted, but these followers are all self-selected. They want to learn more about this topic. It is the ultimate opt-in lead list. The pyramid schemes are all based on the existence of auto-follow bots on many accounts. If you follow millions of people, a high percentage will auto-follow back, but what is the value of this completely non-qualified list? Bulk growth of Twitter accounts is so early 2009. The real key to Twitter marketing with be opt-in lists like this one.
If you use this technique, you can grow a list of engaged followers, and then add whatever messages you want to the account. It isn’t spam, because everyone on the list asked to be there. Let’s say you are a band that wants to build a list of followers interested in your type of music. Just auto-tweet the appropriate alerts, and then add offers for your CDs at regular intervals. The same idea can be applied to all types of ecommerce.
4 Weeks ago
One way of creating buzz within a Twitter account is to add an air of “newsiness”. Instead of just tweeting about your own business, you can tweet about news in your community as a way of showing involvement and attracting followers who are interested in that community. I created a Twitter account yesterday based on my public Google Alerts account for the Border Cafe in Harvard Square to demonstrate this The AlertRank account for these Google Alerts collects news and mentions about the restaurant and competitors, and also searches for Harvard Square and Boston news that can be used in marketing work.
I told AlertRank to autotweet all the alerts that were about the restaurant, or Boston and Harvard Square. I excluded the alerts about competitors. I also asked for hashtags #harvardsquare and #boston to be added to all the tweets.
The tweets are now appearing, and they are an interesting mix of local news and mentions of the restaurant. It is still early, but I think this will be an effective example of how an automatic Twitter account can create a sense of location-specific buzz for a restaurant.
4 Weeks ago
I’m still trying to capture one of these Google Alerts that supposedly tell you when anyone searches for your name. Someone who thought this was happening for him was nice enough to reply to my request to see one or these alerts. He sent me this email:
If someone searches for my name and clicks on a link of mine Google sends me an email telling me which link they clicked on.
I asked to please see an example of these emails, and he replied:
I think I got google alerts wrong. LOL I thought is was every time someone searched for your name and clicked on one of your top links Google sends an email alerting you of the click through.
My bad. I guess that is why I am a designer. Haa haa.
I asked to see the email that made him think it was working, and got no response. So I’m continuing my quest. Have you ever seen any sign that Google Alerts tells you when someone searches for your name? Please send me an example, if you ever receive one.
4 Weeks ago
It’s easy to get so involved with responding to your Google Alerts that you forget to review your search terms. I found myself in this situation the other day. I had a lot of search terms that I was just ignoring, because they weren’t targeted enough. Over time I was getting fewer and fewer actionable alerts. So I went back to the Google Alerts management page, and revised many of them, and deleted the ones that just weren’t useful. Today I found myself with a much higher number of alerts that I could comment on or use as sales leads than I’ve had for a while. I guess even Mr. Google Alerts can get into a rut. When did you last took a hard look at your alert search terms?
4 Weeks ago
The public Google Alerts account for Viagra gives us an opportunity to see how reputation monitoring can be done in practice with AlertRank. The first step is getting an overview of how much traffic each of our alerts is receiving. This can be done by clicking the Analytics tab, and scrolling down to the summary table at the bottom of the page. We can order the results by the average number of alerts received each day by clicking the column heading for Average.
One area we want to focus on for reputation monitoring is reports of problems with the product. The search term viagra (”side effect” OR “side effects” OR recall OR reaction OR “lawsuit” OR litigation OR refund) is getting an average of 8 alerts a day. We can review these alerts by clicking this row in the summary table. By default the alerts are listed in date order, but to help us concentrate on the most influential, we can click the AlertRank column to sort the results. AlertRank is a measure of influence that combines Google PageRank with other ranking factors. The higher the value, the more influential the source.
There are a lot of alerts to review here. It might be necessary to share this data with others to get everything done, so we can save the results to a PDF report and share it by email. This is done by clicking the PDF link in the top right corner, which creates this file.
Let’s focus in on one of the sources of these alerts. The Huffington Post has a story that is extremely negative. We should learn more about the stories this source has been writing about the brand. To do this, we click the alert from the Huffington Post, and then click the Additional Source Data link in the top right corner of the page. This gives us a detail page for this source.
We have been ignoring the sentiment rating for the alerts. That’s the first column with the up and down hand icons at the top. This allows you to rate each alert as positive, negative or neutral. You can’t change this unless you are logged into the account. I’ll rate each story for this source, and then you can see what the results would look like.
Well, I wouldn’t describe this as a friendly source. 75% of the stories are downright hostile. I’ve produced a PDF report for this source, so others can review what we’ve found. Maybe some well placed ads on the site are called for.
Reputation monitoring is just the first step in using Google Alerts for brand management. In future posts I’ll look at using the public account to enhance a brand’s reputation.
1 Month ago
I’ve been reading almost every single tweet about Google Alerts for the last 6 months, and there is one type of comment that I still can’t get to the bottom of. Every once in a while, someone will tweet something like, “Dude, I saw you Google me in my alerts!” Or they’ll say, “I love getting Google Alerts when someone searches for me.” The problem is that there is no way to do this. I’ve checked every source possible, and there is no way to get a Google Alert when someone does a search.
You can see searches that lead to your site in Google Analytics, and you can use several Google Tools to see how often people in general search for specific keywords, but none of these deliver Google Alerts.
The most frustrating part of this phenomenon is that nobody will explain what they mean when I ask how they got a Google Alert for someone searching for them. I ask everyone who says they got this type of alert. All of them reply with a comment like, “I just entered my name in Google Alerts. Don’t you already know how to do that?” That will tell them when people mention them online, but not when their name is entered in a Google search. When I ask why they think the alert was about a search, they never reply.
So I’m left confused and rather frustrated. Do they really think they are getting alerts for searches, when they are actually mentions? Are they just describing them as searches, when they mean mentions? Why do they all answer my first question, but never the second? If anyone has any answers on this, I’d love to hear them.
1 Month ago
