As promised, I mentioned in my last post that I would tell you how to use the Internet to see if people were talking about you. If you own a business, this is a great tool to use because you can ask the Search Engines to notify you when someone mentions your name or business name.

I personally use Google’s Alert tool because Google is constantly reviewing the Internet for new information every hour of the day. It is extremely simple to set up a Google Alert, just go to the following link: http://www.google.com/alerts

In the Search terms enter either your name or business name…be sure to put quotes around your name like “Shawn Pearson” or “Dr. Pearson” so that you only receive emails where your full name is mentioned. Otherwise you will receive an email alert every time someone mentions Shawn or Pearson.

Use the “Type” dropdown list to choose how deep a search you want Google to perform to find your search term. I just use Comprehensive, but you can have other settings including just Blogs, News or discussion Groups.

The “How often” dropdown feature is neat because it will tell you once a day, once a week, or as soon as it finds the reference. If you or your product is high profile and you may be worried about bloggers talking negatively about you, chose “as-it-happens” in this field. This will give you an opportunity to respond in their blog comments to defend your turf. I highly recommend this to any business that wants to protect their brand. You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t do this.

Finally you set the email address to the one you want to send the Alert to…if you have a gmail account, all your Alerts can be managed in one area. If you don’t have or want a gmail account then you will have to manage the alerts by clicking on either the Verify or Cancel links in the initial confirmation email you receive from Google.

You can do a Google Alert for much more than just your name, it could be for specific product you sell, a favorite celebrity, a family member, or whatever you can think that you might want to track. Just make sure you keep the search tight by adding quotes around the search item or else you’ll find yourself getting a ton of email; especially if you set the search for something that is common and choose as-it-happens under How Often.

For more common terms you’ll want to consider using the Google Reader feature, see my next post for more details.