Great Tools to Track Your Footprints on the Internet

Excerpt from Author Lori Gertz's Be the News: A Guide to Going Viral With Your Human Interest Story

Are there good tools on the web for me to track mentions of my name, my company's brand, topics or subjects that I'm invested in? The following are just a few of the tools you can use to keep track of your imprint on the web.

 

Social Mention: Mentions of your Name on the Social Web
A great tool for searching the social Web, Social Mention offers a quick glance at mentions of your name on the Web. Just enter your name and switch between blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news or all of them at once. An RSS feed is available.

Pipl: Searching the Invisible Web
Pipl claims to search the Web to find documents, blog entries, photos, publicly available information that other search engines don't serve up. It's a great, fast search engine that I like; the only disadvantage is it offers no RSS feed.

Monitter: Tracking Twitter
Monitter is one of the coolest looking monitoring tools for Twitter and one of the most useful. Although most people are using Twitter's own search tool for search and alerts on Twitter, Monitter offers a little bit more. Giving you the option to search for three different keywords at once, Monitter is great if you want to keep your eye out for mentions of your name, your username and your company all at the same time. It also offers an RSS feed. Monitter also allows you to narrow the search to a particular geographic location, allowing you to find out what’s going on in a particular area of the world.

BoardTracker: The Ultimate Search Tool for Forums
BoardTracker is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alert system offering relevant results quickly. It’s a great search tool for forums and message boards.

Google Alerts: The Big G
I couldn't end this post without mentioning Google Alerts, although likely most of you are familiar with it outside of what I’ve written here in this book. Although Microsoft and Yahoo have alert tools, I find that Google's offering beats them hands down. It offers e-mail and RSS alerts for any set of keywords including your name.