Should your ears be burning?

It’s one thing to be sending out press releases and newsletters and writing a blog and giving interviews and all the other things that you do to make sure that people find out about you – but how do you know if people are talking about you, and if they are how do you know what they are saying?

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to bug all the homes and offices in the country and have someone listening to everyone’s conversations – and anyone who has watched the live feed from Big Brother will know how mind-numbingly dull that would be if you could. But the wonderful thing about the media is that they are more than happy for you to see what they are talking about, in fact they actively approve of it.

The problem is of course that even between the weekly monthly and quarterly publications of the traditional print media there was more than one person could reasonably be expected to cover. And these days, add in online media, blogs, forum, comments, videos, and podcasts and the signal to noise ratio is so low that you would be better off looking for a needle in a haystack.

So my advice is to stop looking and save your time for more productive things – Of course I’m not advocating that you don’t try to track your profile in the media, I’m just suggesting that you leave the work up to people and programmes that can do it a whole lot more efficiently than you can.

1) Hire a cuttings agency -Somewhere, in a room, surrounded by piles and piles of newspapers, sits someone with a highlighter pen and eye strain, and unless you want that person to be you, then a cutting agency is invaluable. You let them know what key phrases, words and/or names that you want to track, and they send you an envelope of cuttings every week (or day, if you want) to stick into your scrapbook. These agencies charge by the search term, and sometimes by the cutting too – it varies from agency to agency. But if you just want to know when your company or product name appears in print then they are invaluable.

2) Google is your friend – Google works by indexing everything that it comes across on the web, they then do compliated things with that information to work out what people are looking for when they search for things. Those nice people at Google thought they could do even more with all this data and so they launched Google Alerts. Essentially these do the same thing as the cutting agency, but thanks to the wonder of technology they do it without the risk of eyestrain to anyone, and they cover the entire internet. All you have to do to set up an alert is to enter the word or phrase to be tracked and google will e-mail you the results, at your convenience.

A word of warning though, Google Alerts is a completely free service, and you can set up as many alerts as you want. It’s all to easy to set up alerts for everything and anything that you are interested in, and the next day you come in to an inbox bursting to the seams with links and information. Use sparingly to start with, and experiment with seach terms until you are getting the volume and quality of information that you desire.