Google Alerts
If you’ve already got your Google profile set up, then you may have already discovered the very useful Google Alerts- updates based on your choice of subject, sent directly to you, by either HTML or Plain Text emails.
It’s all very easy to get registered for- simply visit the Google Alerts page where you’ll be asked to enter the search terms of your chosen subject. Diet Girl here at Vizcom Design is a big fan of Eurovision (no surprises there) so she entered ‘Eurovision Song Contest 2011’ into her search terms. You’re then asked what type of material you’re interested in receiving alerts about.
For example, Diet Girl wants to know everything she can about Eurovision 2011, so she set her Google Alerts to ‘Everything’, meaning that any references to the song contest next year on news websites, blogs, videos and forum discussions that have been indexed on Google and are within the first ten most popular will be sent to her in the form of a Google Alert.
You can set your Alerts individually as to how often you receive them and also the length of each email, with the choice of having up to 50 results on a single Alert. And, as of October 2008, you can set your Alerts to be received via your Googlemail account or on a dedicated RSS feed.
Although Alerts only collect updates from websites that Google alone has indexed, this is no bad thing as it’s the biggest and most well-known search engine out there, and as a business owner, the service itself is incredibly useful. You can use Alerts to keep an eye on your competitors, and what’s going on in your chosen industry. You can also use it to monitor large events (like Eurovision!) and follow famous people- useful if your products or services can in some way be linked to a spokesperson or celebrity.
Alerts not only inform you of the latest information, but also supply you with lots of juicy links for your status updates. This instills to anyone viewing your presence online that your company is very well informed about your industry, creating a knowledgeable image.