How to Capture Every Mention of Your Name

It may seem like an impossible task, but its actually very easy to track every mention of your brand or name online.    Thanks to RSS we can grab feeds from a number of different sources and use a realtime tracker to keep up to date.

Why Do I need This?

I’m not going to argue whether or not you should be into personal branding.  What I will say, if you’ve got a blog you’ve got a brand.  So whether you believe in personal branding or are choosing to live with your eyes shut, you can’t actually avoid the fact people are talking about you/your brand (the same thing).   And once you see people talking about your brand, you can join in the conversation!

Here’s how I keep up to date with what people are saying about my startup.

Choose Your Keywords

This is the easy bit.  For my app I use “Task.fm”, “taskfm” “www.task.fm”.  If I wanted to track mentions of my name I would use “Anthony Feint” and “Feint”.

Find These Feeds

If an RSS feed is available (and it will be after completing these searches), the RSS icon will be displayed in the Firefox address bar (same in other browsers too).  Simply click this to grab the feed.  Copy these addresses down.

Twitter Search – Complete a search on Twitter for the keywords you chose above.  Do a search for each, and grab the related RSS feed.

Delicious – Do a search on Delicious for your sites name/your name.  This will show you when people bookmark your content.  Notice I put my blogs name in the browser title for every single page.  This way when someone bookmarks an article, I can easily track it in Delicious.

Google Alerts – Google alerts will capture Twitter results, although it does take a while.  Its more useful for capturing pretty much every other mention.  Whether its a blog article, forum post or a mention on Tumblr, this will pick it up.    You are given the option to choose between an email or feed.  Select “feed”, or you might be overwhelmed with emails.

Just these three feeds will capture 90% of mentions online.

Create a FriendFeed Room/Group

On FriendFeed you can create custom (and private) groups which will automatically keep track of the RSS feeds.  FriendFeed is a realtime app, so as soon as the RSS feed is updated, the new items will show live in FriendFeed.

Once registered at FriendFeed, visit this page to create group.   Then simply add the RSS feeds.

The Result

As you can see, this snapshot shows what was happening concerning me about 24 hours ago.    This the type of page you can keep open all day (it refreshes automatically) and see a live stream of mentions.