Social Mention

As a professional, building and keeping up a good reputation could bring you those career opportunities and advancements you have always dreamed of.  Unfortunately, over the last 10 years the skyrocketing success of the Internet and social media means you need to monitor your reputation more closely.  You can spend your whole life building up that notoriety and in 5 minutes it could be lost.  Negative comments and information can show up in search results, in forums, in blogs, in online videos and in your social networking profiles. 

There are hundreds of tools out there that allow you to track and monitor your reputation.  These are some of the top programs I found that monitor all your general Internet coverage.  Come back the rest of this week to see programs specific to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedn.

1. TrackUR – Trackur is a social media-monitoring tool. It is a paid service that tracks what is said about you on the internet by scanning millions of web pages–including news, blogs, video, images, and forums. It will then let you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.  
2. Reputation Defender – For $14.95 per month Reputation Defender allows you to review everything that’s available about you online, on both the open Internet and the ‘Invisible Web’. If there is unwanted content about you on the Internet, their team works to remove it.  You receive a monthly report that defines your up to date online reputation.
3. BuzzDing – BuzzDing offers a free trial to try out its services and then you are charged a monthly fee.  By entering keywords you are able to track and find potentially embarrassing social media content.  From the results of your keyword search you can filter mentions, organize into projects, flag items, and add notes to keep track of what’s been said and who said it. 
4. Trendrr – Trendrr offers a free or paid membership, that allows you to track real-time social media mentions.  You can choose from over 40 top social media and online services for keywords that you input. 
5. Social Mention – Social Mention is a free tracking tool that allows you to easily track what people are saying about you across the web and social media landscape in real-time. It monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google and sends you a daily email update.
6. Yacktrack Chatter - YackTrack is Chatter is a keyword search for social media sites. This allows you to see “chatter” on various sites that talk about a specific keyword. So if you are looking for mentions of your name, you just enter it in the Chatter search box and click the “Find Chatter” button.
7. Filtrbox – Filtrbox allows you to see what others are saying about you on Twitter, social networks, blogs and thousands of online news outlets.  By signing up for their service and setting up a search you will receive daily email updates 
8. Rapleaf.com – By creating an account with Rapleaf you can discover the information about yourself that is available on the internet and manage your internet footprint.
9. Google Alerts – Google Alerts allows you to put in a keyword and receive an email every time those keywords are discovered
10. Yahoo Alerts – Similar to Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts sends you an alert whenever your keyword pops up in a search.  It gives you’re the option of receiving alerts by Yahoo Messenger or even via SMS.
11. Windows Live Alerts – Live Alerts is Microsoft’s alerts service that is similar to Google and Yahoo.  Like Yahoo you can receive your alerts through Email, Instant Messenger or SMS text. 
12. TinEye - TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.  You can upload an image of yourself and make sure it is not being used anywhere else.