Managing Your Reputation Online: 5 Essential Tools

Want to keep up to date on what bloggers, Twitter posters and others are saying about you online? You need to do more than set a Google alert for your name. Tune in to these five free tools that do more to help you proactively defend your online reputation.

[Click here to learn how you can proactively defend your reputation online.]

1. Addict-o-matic: Enter your name into the site, and you’ll see the latest mentions arranged in boxes from sites such as Bing, Google Blog Search, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Bloglinks and more. Addict-o-matic also allows you to customize your results page by adding, deleting or rearranging the source boxes.

2. SocialMention: SocialMention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates and streams user-generated content. It allows you to track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, etc., in real time. The site aggregates information from over 100 social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg and Google. You can also set alerts for a keyword, which SocialMention will deliver to your inbox daily.

3. Technorati: Technorati is a search engine for blogs. You have two options for search: You can search mentions of someone’s name in blogs and you can search blogs belonging to that specific person. Other sites to search blogs: BlogPulse and BackType.

4. TweetBeep: TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. The site e-mails you when someone tweets your name, company or product (you can also track who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they’ve used a shortened URL like ow.ly or bit.ly). Also try Twitter Search.

5. Yasni: Yasni is a people search engine that provides an overview of someone’s associated networks, including contacts, pictures and other publicly available information. In searching for a name, Yasni will aggregate mentions from sites including LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Technorati and more.

Staff Writer Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter: @kmburnham.