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Do you or your organisation make use of the Google Alerts service?

What is a Google Alert? Well essentially it’s just an automated and scheduled Google search of Google News and/or the Google web site index, the results of which get sent periodically to your email address. You get to choose a frequency of daily, weekly or ‘as it happens’ for each alert you set up.

Many individuals have a Google Alert set for their own name, enabling them to find out who has been slandering / praising them online this week, and sometimes why. Also often watched for are the names of loved ones, family, friends, and favourite footy team. Google Alerts is probably perfect for celebrity stalkers too.

Businesses use it to monitor what’s being said online about them, their competitors, supply chain partners, channel partners, their market segments, and so on. It’s a very useful market intelligence tool if you want to use it that way. The possible applications are many and varied, it’s free, easy to use, and here’s but an example. Read the rest of this entry »

Mainstream coverage of business blogging here in Australia has been patchy at best. So it was nice to see Chris Jenkins’ recent piece Blogging the Brand in the Australian IT section of The Australian newspaper.

The article profiles Telstra’s other grand blogging experiment Now We Are Talking. Given it still has a way to go in rebuilding its corporate image, the telco seems to be betting that blogs will help it ratchet up the PR machine just that little further.

More broadly, Jenkins quotes Microsoft’s Frank Arrigo on his outlook for Aussie business blogging, particularly at the big(ger) end of town:

It’s likely that corporate blogging won’t begin to pick up momentum with Australian businesses until the middle of next year.

As more organisations understand that this is a great way of talking to customers and hearing back from customers, they will start to embrace it.