Using Google Alerts

  • How much do you know about what people are saying about you online?
  • What are people writing about your organisation's sphere of interest?
  • Have ex-employees made comments about you, are your staff mouthing off?
  • Has your chairperson been mentioned on the news or in blogs?
  • How do you compare with the competition?
  • Who's stealing your content?

All these questions and more can be answered by using Google Alerts, and best of all, it costs you nothing but your time.

It's very quick and simple to set up these alerts, and you don't even need a Google address.

Google alerts

As an example, look at the screen above.

This will deliver to the email address specified a digest of all web pages recently indexed by Google containing the specified search terms and of the type required.

In this example, for the Borders Family History Society, they particularly want to know who is referring to them by their full name (first row), and short name (second row).

They are researching and publishing "Poor Law" records, so the third row will let them know who else is researching this topic and whether their content is being reviewed.

The fourth row refers to a historical figure and they want to know if anyone is stealing their content. A recent alert showed that others were offering their book about this minister at a much higher price second-hand than their new price.

The different types are Blogs, News, Video, Web, Comprehensive. You can select only one type per row so most of the time I choose Comprehensive. The How Often column can be as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week, and that depends on how time-critical new content is and how much time you can spare to monitor results.

The digest typically contains a web link, a couple of lines from the relevant web page, and the address of the web page itself.

For example, here's a bit of the alert for "Borders FHS":

Example report

I hope I've whetted your appetite, so to start, just go to Google Alerts.

Peter Munro, Project Definer