Web Design Ireland

I’m a bit of a obsessive compulsive Ego-searcher. In fact I put together a wee tool a while back for combining some searches around the blogosphere, and spitting out an RSS feed for it. Knowing when someone has done you the favour of linking to you or when someone is talking about your product or service is something that is becoming more and more important in marketing.

Online reputation management is a space online that at the minute is hot and is heating up. With some many alternative methods of communicating online, with forums, blogs and online chat, chances are that your company will be finding it hard to tap into who is saying what and when. In fact major brands such as Microsoft, Dell and Panasonic have turned to professional companies such as Visible Technologies to monitor their brands online - and take appropriate action, should feedback be negative.

Should certain results in the SERP’s be overly negative, search engine optimisation has been employed to push negative results down and replace them with positive ones. If an opinion has been formed on social media, a contradicting opinion will be pushed alongside it.

Unfortunately for the most of us - professional reputation management is out of our budgets.

So how can the rest of us keep an eye on our own reputations online?

Ego-Searches

I’ve already mentioned that you can do this on Twitter for marketing purposes. So what better way to keep an eye on a brand?

Meme tracking Services

Google have recently launched a new version of their Blog Search - with built in meme tracking. Deep down in the documentation for Google Blog Search over here - we can use the blogurl: operator to search specifically for your blog, and this will give you a blog search which you can subscribe to via RSS or email.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=webdistortion&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

The above URL will allow me to track the term “webdistortion” across the blogosphere.

Mashable has a good list of alternative MemeTrackers over here.

Personally I like to try and keep an eye on when I’ve been bookmarked - either socially or otherwise. Whilst it is easy to find out when I’ve been bookmarked via del.icio.us. (Yes I’ve got another RSS feed for that). See the RSS icon in the bottom left of the screenshot below. Many of the major social bookmarking sites offer the option to subscribe to particular searches via RSS.

So how on earth can I determine when I’ve been bookmarked via the browser? Well, its a relatively unknown fact that when a site gets bookmarked in either firefox or Internet Explorer - a request goes through for a file called FavIcon.ico - so what I’ve done is written a mod rewrite rule to catch this file request - and

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .*favicon.ico /logrequest.php [passthrough]

Now - you could of course log this request in a text file, send yourself an email, or log IP_addresses to a database and generate an RSS feed for yourself from the data. It’s all up to you. It’s just one more way of knowing that you are loved, or the reason someone bookmarked you.