How do you use Google Alerts in your marketing?
Value: [rating=4]
Our commentary: I think many marketers are signed up for Google Alerts and use it for the obvious, but useful. I usually recommend setting up alerts so that you're emailed when the following are included on a newly published page and first indexed by Google:
1. Your "brand"
2. Your "brand" +
3. Your "brand" +/-
4. Your "http://www.webaddress.com"
5. Any of the above for competitors
6. Any of the above for key customers (B2B)
If you want to exclude your own site or any other site you can use the -site:www.yoursite.com syntax
It's also worth remembering you can use negative's for example I use -books,-book since lots of retailers have pages featuring my books but I don't want to be alerted about those.
Here's an example of an alert I set up a while ago on my old site:
+"dave chaffey" -books -book -pdf -download -site:davechaffey.com
I was prompted…
Question: How should I measure online pr? I am trying to write my objectives for a marketing campaign.
Smart Insights Expert Answer: Thanks for your question - it's good to see you're going for SMART objectives...
While you may not be able to set specific goals for these, it's worth stating in the plan what you will be measuring, since then you can make sure you're tracking these measures and start to build up a library of the PR or buzz effectiveness of campaigns.
As for any goal-setting and measurement you can't stress enough how having clear goals (business specific) is the key, and that those goals are aligned to commercials.
I think it's always to break down campaign measures into goals of volume, quality and cost so for PR, the type of measures to consider are:
Volume
Number of mentions of brand or campaign name during the campaign
Incremental growth in Facebook Likes or Twitter follows
Backlinks…
Bit.ly is now the defacto standard for URL shorteners in Twitter and Tweetdeck, etc, but I find many marketers aren't aware of how it can also be used for tracking the effectiveness of their content. It's essential to check you're staying relevant and useful through this instant feedback.
Before we get to the 4 steps, here is an example of a new (Nov 2009) "click summary" feature in Bit.ly which you access from your home page. You can see that this gives you a great overview of:
Geographical location of your audience
Use of Twitter.com (just 17%) for interacting against other applications - 20%
How to use Bit.ly to track PR effectiveness
The first 4 steps to get this feedback on what your followers are interested in take just 5 minutes to setup and it's automatic after that, so if you're not already, get tracking!
Step 1…
