It's been said before, but it's worth repeating. Be sure you monitor your web address in Technorati in addition to specific keywords. Sure, many PR firms will search for their client names and services but remember to look for the URL.
What do I mean by this? Well, enter the full URL of your site in the Technorati search, i.e. http://www.hyku.com/. When you do this Technorati will show you any blog link to that specific URL. This type of search will uncover some additional conversation around your company/client that never mentions the name or keywords you might normally be looking for.
For example, an unhappy shopper might write a blog post that says, "I hate this store!" and link the word 'store' to your site. If you're just monitoring the basics, i.e. company name, service name(s) and the variants then you would miss this link. By monitoring the URL of the site, Technorati would pick it up.
Of course you can always do the standard link:URL search on Google, but that's a traditional relevance search, but a real-time blog search.
Visitor Comments
Josh: It's always worth repeating the basics. The good news is you can get this search fed to you via RSS as well as your name.
But I find this approach even more useful in quickly assessing a blog's reach.
Technorati lists my blog as having 142 blogs linking to it. But if you search for my blog URL in blog posts you will find 1,038 links to the URL. There are certainly some of the same blogs linking to me multiple times, but there is a big difference between the two numbers.
Posted by: Kevin Dugan | October 21, 2006 12:54 PM
hey Josh! Once again, you seem to be ahead of the gang on updating companies on different ways to make sure their companies are not listed with a bunch of negative complaints. It definitely seems like it would be beneficial for all companies to monitor their company websites in the Technorati address. It seems like companies who are not informed about proper social media practices would be completely lost without some of your helpful advice. It's good to see that you are willing to help keep companies updated on the latest in social media online.
Posted by: Rachel D. | October 22, 2006 2:34 PM
Hey Josh,
Good reminder.
You can get a Google blog search using the link:url process and sort by date or relevance. blogsearch.google.com
And Kevin, I believe the difference is due to the way Technorati drops links from that total after 180 days. See Making Sense of Link Counts at Technorati.
Posted by: Robert French | October 22, 2006 2:53 PM
What a great tip. Most companies do not realize that just checking the basics does not cut it when searching for things about your company on the web. It would be great if there was some way of training companies that are clueless about social media and make them more aware about these advances in technology. Everyone in the company could easily look out for the best interest of the company by simply knowing how to check these sites.
Posted by: Rachel M | October 23, 2006 3:36 PM