Many of you will already know that Google Alerts is a great way to help you with basic online reputation management. By entering search keywords you can receive a daily email with all new entries in the first 50 Google results.

This is not enough for big companies. They want all new relevant content and preferrably in realtime. There is a lot of expensive online reputation management software out there (e.g. Radion6, Coosto, Trackur). But great online reputation management doesn’t have to be expensive!

Start by using the advanced search options of Google in Google Alerts (e.g. site:). The image below shows a search for the keyword “RD Internet”, but only for LinkedIn pages on Google. As soon as there is new content on LinkedIn that contains the word “RD Internet” and enter the first 50 results on Google (on “RD Internet” site:linkedin.com) I receive an email. But by choosing the feed option, I can watch changes almost in realtime.

The image below shows how a RSS feed looks like (for the keyword “TiasNimbas” on LinkedIn).

You can add multiple sites for your keywords (e.g. Twitter.com, Facebook, MSN.com, and WSJ.com). Using a feedreader like FeedDemon is a great way to categorise all the feeds. You could use the following categories: blogs, community’s, and news sites.

Do you know PHP or an other programming language? You could also store the feeds in a database. This enables you to create your own front-end interface. You can add notes or statusses to an alert. You could also assign an alert to a member of your webcare team. Go even further and you could add sentiment (e.g. negative, positive or neutral) or add impact (e.g. low, medium, high). You can print out statistics on sentiment or source. I have created SocialTracer.com (update 27-11-2012: SocialTracer is no longer online and free to use due to high server load).