The importance of Alerts in Online Reputation Management

If you are under the impression that you are too involved in your business to care about the Internet, you are mistaken. Your online reputation can be at stake. With a lot of people turning to electronic media for news and gossip, you cannot undermine the power of online reputation management.

There is a principle called karma in the Hindu culture, which says that every deed has its repercussions. If you do good, you are rewarded. If you do bad, you are punished. The consequence may take its own time but soon you do get your just deserts. There is a scientific rationale behind it too; as Newton said: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. As you sow, so shall you reap is another saying that typifies the relationship between cause and effect.

Taking what I said in the above paragraph to the next level, I would say that this karma spreads across the world through Internet. If you do good things, you are talked about. If you do wrong, you are sniggered at. Type the name of your company or even your name(if you are influential) and you will see a lot of things that people are talking about. Most of the talking (or rather information written) in the search-engines may not be the way you want it to be. There may be some which are disturbing and portray a negative image about you or the project you are heading. How about using online reputation management and investing in time, effort and money to make sure that information is spread in the right away about your brand? Your efforts to market yourself positively and to add posts in the first couple of pages of a search engine will certainly win you a lot of goodwill and respect.

To make sure that you get a buzz about what is happening about your brand, company, products, industry or your field of interest; you should set up an ‘alert.’ There are Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts which help you automate the entire system of monitoring for the relevant keywords or key-phrases that you require. When you set up alerts, you are ‘alerted’ automatically about anything new happening on your field of interest. You can set up these ‘alerts’ through a section in either Google News or Yahoo News. In the ‘alerts’ section of Google, you are asked about what kind of alert you want-whether in relation to blogs, web, groups or comprehensive. It is a good move to choose ‘comprehensive’ if you want to have alerts from all possible avenues. You are also allowed to time the frequency of alerts. When you set alerts, you get information about any updates right there in your inbox. This is quite instrumental in devising a plan of action for online reputation management.