Google Alerts: helping your business stay informed
I’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now and just thought I’d share my view on the usefulness of this tool:
Basically Google Alerts is a tool you set up to scour the web and let you know of anything new. When it finds something new that matches your search criteria it sends you an e-mail – either once a day, once a week or as it happens. So for example you could create one alert that monitors news websites for your local town. When your local town’s name is mentioned in the news, you get an alert via e-mail.
For even greater interest create a comprehensive alert for your store’s name. If your store has a more general term as the name you would do best to use quotation marks (i.e. “The Report Card”) so you get more relevant results. The results can be very interesting when you see people blogging about shopping at your store or when a local newspaper mentions you.
Lastly, create an alert to notify you about your competitors and what they are doing. For example, create a comprehensive alert for “Lakeshore Learning” (remember to use the quotes) – they are mentioned fairly frequently.
If anyone finds any other cools uses of Google Alerts please feel free to share . . .
Cheers, Mike
mcornelia.com 