15 Nov 07 Using Google Alerts to Track Online Conversations
I was at the Geek Terminal yesterday at a panel titled Blogging For Business: An Open Conversation on Approach, Value and Ethics organized by the Institute of Public Relations in Singapore.
One of the questions was how to find out what people are saying about ones products. Google alert is a simple and inexpensive way of tracking what people are saying about your products, organisation, people and key incidents.
1. Go to the website of Google Alerts. http://www.google.com/alerts
2. Type in the word you want to track
Here I am using iPod Touch as the example. You can type name of a person or name of an event etc.
3. Choose what type of media you want to track. If you select “Comprehensive”, Google will search through News reports, blogs, videos and google’s discussion groups. I am choosing “Comprehensive” but you can choose “Blogs” if you are only interested in blogs.
4. The next setting “How Often” wants to know the frequency of alert emails. I chose “once a day”
5. Type in your email and click on the “Create Alert” Button. If you are going to be following many such keywords, I suggest create a new email account on Gmail. As gmail also belongs to google, it is easier to manage your alerts.
6. Google will send you an email to verify your request.
7. Check your email.
Here I see the email from Google. I will open it.
8. Click on the link provided to verify the request.
9. Google will let you know that your request has been verified.
10. Don’t delete the email as you may need it in the future to cancel your alert request.
Just open the email again and click on the second link to cancel the alert request.
Reader's Comments
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It’s really a cool one,I used to track all the happenings on my technology front.
Thanks Raja, have a good day.
I believe it only works with certain sites, tried it once to monitor brotherhood press online and the only thing that I received was a really scary message when my computer suddenly came alive and starting behaving like Linda Blair in the Exorcist repeating the line, “that doesnt work! that doesnt work, that doesnt work ditto”
[...] BetterDays provide a great tutorial on setting up a Google Alert, if you’re struggling at all, and Krishna De will tell you exactly how useful she finds Google Alerts. [...]
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