Reputation Management Tools

Whether you're a large corporation like Comcast or an independent freelancer like me it's important to manage your online reputation and you're going to need a reputation management tool to do that. Let's say for example, you have a client that's unhappy with your products or services and they've started a blog about you or posted a complaint on ripoffreport.com. This could have a tremendous effect on your bottom line and you want to address these issues before you lose business. For that matter, even if you were a local Chicago Website Company that didn't care about your clients or your employees you could still use this as a cheap reputation management tool.

But let's assume you're a reputable company and you care about your customers. Not to worry, the Google Alerts API is the perfect tool for reputation management and best of all it's free. Here's a quick breakdown on what these great online reputation management tools do.

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts: News, Web, Blogs, Video, Comprehensive, and Groups. The API monitors Google for the keyword/s and phrases you specify and alerts you when any of your phrases are indexed so you can go the site and see what's happening, pretty simple. A negative would be you can only monitor Google and not any other search engines, but that's not so bad for the price tag.

Even though there are some limitations, Google Alerts is a great way to make sure your customers are happy and with a little practice and some tweaking, you've got yourself one heck of a online reputation management tool.