How to Monitor Your Online Reputation

Last week I received notice that a company in Australia was selling our material on eBay. They cleverly packaged it with other people's recordings and renamed the product so as not to make it too obvious that they were an unauthorized reseller.

We went through the proper channels to file a complaint online and within one business day the seller's profile had been removed from eBay.

A few years back we would have had to rely on someone who purchased the product online to contact us directly, and there is a strong likelihood that we would never discover what was occurring (particularly since the company resides in Australia).

So how did we find out about this and resolve it so quickly?

We sign up for a service called Google Alerts that assists us in monitoring our online reputation.

All you need is a google account to get started - then - choose the search terms that are most important to your company or brand name and decide how often you would like these results to be delivered to you. Google will do the rest. The service will scour the Internet looking for any mention of your search term and will report it back to you in an e-mail.

Do you want to know if you are being slandered online? Google Alerts can help you with that.

Do you want to monitor your competition? It can help you in this area.

Or maybe you are considering breaking into a new market and want to know what the primary characteristics are - - It can certainly assist with this.

The only limit to the service is the creativity of the search terms that you come up with.

If this sounds too much like an endorsement that is because - - it is....How important is it to protect your brand name?