Keep Track of your Online Reputation - a beginner's guide to online media monitoring

Monitoring online media can be a really complex issue that forces you to deal with huge amounts of not too well structured information. That's the bad news. The good news is: There are a lot of free tools that helps you keep an eye on who is talking about you, who is talking about the person who is talking about you, and what are generally hot topics in online media now.

Tracking online conversations faces three main challenges:

• You have to identify the important players and track them, whether they are talking about you or about someone else.
• You have to find out, who else is talking about you, even if you don't have him on your list yet.
• Finally, you want to know if this new person joining the conversation is of any relevance.

Track your daily reading

The first challenge is easy to meet using RSS Readers. You just surf to the sites or blogs you want to track, look for their RSS-Feeds and copy them into your reader.
Since most of us don't have the possibility to install software, we will have to use online readers. The most prominent online RSS-Readers are Netvibes and Google Reader.
Both are free and easy to use, all you have to do is sign up for an account.
The advantage of Netvibes is that it's more colourful and that you can also use it to integrate some applications, but I switched to using Google Reader.
What I like most about it:

• You can group feeds in folders.
• It will always tell you how many new items there are in every folder or feed.
• You can add your own tags and thus create your personal archive without having to copy anything to your desktop.
• You can integrate any kind of feed - be it from a newspage, a blog, a Twitter-account

Having done this, your Google Reader is your personal media monitor that displays all updates from all media you want to track on one page.

Find new sources

To handle the second challenge - find out who else is talking about you - using Google Alerts is a great option. You can use it with the same account you created for Google Reader.
To get started, to specify the search term you want to monitor (eg. your brand, you CEO's name), decide if you want to monitor the whole web, only blogs, news or groups and how often you want to receive updates.
You could now specify an email address to get the updates via mail - but the way cooler method that does not spam your mailbox is to get the RSS feed of that alert and integrate it in your Google Reader - that allows you to have everything at a glance: Those who you are watching permanently and those you are talking about you just by chance.

Check out the background of your new sources

But how to find out if these sites are important, with whom they are connected?
To check out a new website - go there and read it; look for a masthead, evtl. check out the domain owner eg on whois.net.
If it is a blog, check out it's authority at technorati or it's rank at other blog searchengines like Icerocket or Twingly.
Additionally, check out the link popularity for this page: Go to Google and type "link:www.domain.com" (replacing domain.com with the page you want to check out) - this will give you a list with all pages that link to that page, so that you can decide if this an important user or not.

Last but not least, Touchgraph is a nice tool to check out the virtual environment of a blog or another online media. You can use the demo on touchgraph.com, search for the url you want to check out and you will receive a visualisation of which sites are connected to this site, how big they are, which sites they are connected to etc.

If you find influential bloggers through the alerts, you can add them to your main blog-feeds - and create a quite efficient monitoring loop that way.