You Ask, I Answer: Simple System for Brand Monitoring?

In today's episode, Faucia asks, I guess that's how it's pronounced. I'm looking for an alternative to Google Alerts. What do you use? So I use a combination of uh Talk Walker Alerts, which is a free service offered by TalkWalker, full disclosure, they're a business partner of my company, um, and Feedly. And the reason for this is that the alerting um techniques and the alerting notifications you get for a lot of different alerting services, send email to your inbox.

I don't need any more email, and I certainly don't need uh it multiple times throughout the day. And it's not an easy way to keep things organized. Uh that's been the biggest challenge with things like Google Alerts. You just get email alerts of stuff, and you're like, I don't want any of this, right? So um use these two tools in combination.

Let's go ahead and uh flip this around here. So this is TalkWalker Alerts. One of the most useful things about it is that it allows you to um to get things by RSS feed. So let's go ahead and I'm gonna have an alert here for me. Let's create a new alert.

Let's do for trust insights or using basic Boolean syntax here, so uh the same things you'd use the Google alert. Um let's go ahead and choose news, Twitter, blogs, discussions in the English language. Actually, let's leave it all languages, uh, as it happens, all results, and create alert. Now, what I've done is I've turned email off, which is down here, and let's create uh one more here for my business partner. Same thing here.

Okay. Now that's a good first step, right? We've got uh feed for me, uh feed for my business partner, uh feed for uh the company. Actually, let's put in one in for more marketing over coffee while I'm thinking about it. Our Twitter handle.

All languages as it happens, all results. Great. Each of these has this little icon here, which is an RSS feed. And if you're not familiar with RSS feeds, uh they are a way to subscribe to blogs, right? So let's go over here to Feedly.

I'm gonna create a new feed and call it monitoring. Now let's add some content to monitoring, and I'm gonna copy each one of these links. Let's go ahead and merge these two windows here. There you go. And we're gonna follow that in our monitoring folder.

Actually, let's put that in a the regular monitoring folder. There we go. Now we do that again. Now, where this comes becomes really helpful is if you need to have this broken up by client instead of having just one folder for monitoring, you could have a folder for each individual client with multiple alerts for each client. And one more.

Great. Now we've got our monitoring folder set up here. And now obviously you have to wait for it to populate because there's nothing in that feed yet. Nothing has happened. But what will happen is over time we will have all of our alerts show up like this.

And then instead of having to sift through piles and piles of email, which is no fun, want to be you want to be able to just come into one place, go in, check it, see what's happening, and get in and out and you're done. Right. Or as you get uh know with a lot of these uh services like Feedly, you can track things, bookmark them, you can send them uh by email to other people. If you've got a team, you can delegate um with Feedly because it authenticates with the Google account. If you have a Team Gmail account, you can uh set your monitoring up and have multiple people in there checking things, um assigning stuff.

So it's a very powerful, simple, free solution for putting together um some basic monitoring. Here's the thing. With all these services, you get what you pay for. If you're paying nothing for it, you can't be mad if you don't get great results. You if you want better results, you do have to you know pull out the credit card and start uh buying stuff.

Uh we use uh Talk Walker's pro service. You know, again, disclosure they're a partner of our company, but you get many more, many better results out of it that way uh than you do other free service. The free service is good. Uh it is good, but it is not as thorough and as comprehensive uh as getting the the paid service, which covers you know like 40 different sources and things like that. So if you just don't have the money, this is a simple system for monitoring stuff.

Um if you do have the money, invest in a in a heavier duty monitoring service. Um the bigger thing is just having a system for checking those alerts, however frequently or infrequently, and being able to uh clear them out or to do something with them. Um again, one of the things that's handy here is you if you wanted to, you could even give access to uh this feed to a client, right? So you could uh set up a a team with your client and let them uh uh go in here and and see what's happening as well, if that was something that uh they were asking you for. So that's the the easy version.

Again, I would stay away from anything that sends you more email because the last thing any of us want is more email. Uh it doesn't really help. And the bigger thing is making sure that we're doing something with uh the data as we have it. So it's not enough to monitor. You've got to do something with it, whether it's providing reporting, things like that, uh, whether it is taking action on stuff.

Uh that's what you want to be able to do to provide additional value. If you have follow-up questions on this, let me know. Uh leave a comment in the box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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