Monitoring what people say about your company in the blogsphere

Historically I have relied on Public Relations firms to provide a daily scan of articles on anything related to my company, competitors or industry. I also have set-up Google alerts. Recently I discovered a number of blog monitoring tools that are free and easy to use. I like blogs as a complement to my daily traditional and digital publications scans. Major publications like the Wall Street Journal have a blog that does not always comes-up in Google for instance.


Today, I would like to talk about Technorati.


Technorati claims to track more than 112 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media (posts, photos and videos). You can perform keyword searches across blogs and conversations, in more than 20 languages. A service to rank blogs was added recently.

When performing searches, I usually use my company name and its competitors. Sometime I will track down some particular words that are related to my industry. I can modify the date range in order to compare who is talking about what in a given time period.

Unlike its major competitor ( blogpulse), what I like about Technorati is I can also refine my search and select only articles published in the most popular blogs. This is referred as authority. The authority ranking gives me an idea as to how many blogs link to it. The Wall Street Journal has a ‘lot of authority’ for example. From a PR perspective, the authority is probably as important (if not more) than the number of impressions.

Finally Technorati also offers URL and tag searches. I particularly like the URL search function, which lists blogs that link to my company web site (you can also find out what these blogs say).