Radically Transparent Arrives in My Mailbox

I love coincidences.  A couple of weeks ago I listened to an interview with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, and author of the recently published Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online (interviewed by John Jantsch). I ordered the brand new book and received it yesterday. I can't wait to get started reading it.

Today in my Feedblitz updates, there was a post by Paul Chaney about an online reputation management tool called Trakur, developed by Andy Beal.

Trakur takes Google Alerts to another level. Why use Trakur when Google Alerts is free?

Google Alerts only monitors content available through one of Google's search engines. Trackur monitors many more web channels than just Google. In addition, Trackur allows you to save items, sort them, share them via email, and subscribe to an RSS feed--Google Alerts offers none of these features.

I've set up a 14 day free trial on the keyword phrase "Blog Squad" so I can test how the tool works.  What came up in the initial search were blog posts, web pages, videos, photos on Flickr and much more.  Very complete.

We've talked a lot in the past about how and why you need to control the conversation about you, your brand and your business. We always advise our clients to set up Google Alerts on their name, business name, competitors and key words in their niche. Now you can go more indepth with your monitoring with Trakur.

Reputation management means you need to have a blog, profiles on the major social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace (there are many others as well). You also need to know what others are saying about you so you can

1) correct inconsistencies

2) thank people for saying nice things

3) monitor and correct negative content

If you want to know more about online reputation management, check out the Radically Transparent blog which supports his book, and listen to our interview with personal branding expert William Arruda.

Comments

[Andy Beal]

Thanks for the kind words about the book and Trackur.com--I hope you find them both useful.

[Thiru]

Wow.. thanks for the hint about Trakur. Definitely, I should try it. Google Alerts were not all that good.

[Chris Lockwood]

Thanks for the tip. I never heard of Trakur, and it makes sense that another service might be useful along with Google Alerts.

[Ryan]

Have you seen or used the beta version of www.aircheese.com ? I'm looking for someone who has. Trakur is disappointing in a lot of ways.