Protect Your Brand

Protecting your brand is the name of the game these days. There's just too much competition out there for you not to be continuously looking for ways to improve. You say you don't have a brand? Wrong. Every company and every person has a brand whether you realize it or not. It's what defines you. It's what sets you apart from everyone else. If you don't see or work on your brand, you're not going to be in business for too awful long.

One of the (many) things you need to do is protect yourself by actively seeking out the things that others are saying about you, whether good or bad. You need to be prepared to react appropriately to accusations or capitalize on positive comments. You don't have time though to sit at your desk and manually search for your name in articles, blogs, video's, etc. That's where Google comes in - I love Google. Contrary to what you may think, the Google website is chock full of all kinds of everyday business tools. It's definitely not just a search engine.

One of the things that Google can do for you is to send you alerts when people are talking about you. Create a Google account, if you haven't already, and go to www.google.com/alert. Here you can type in key words or phrases, like your company name, CEO's name, etc, and Google will continuously and automatically search the web for you and send you e-mail alerts whenever you're mentioned. Pretty cool, huh? And guess what - it's FREE. You can't beat it.

Setting up alerts takes less than a minute. Start taking some steps to improve your brand, and start right here and now. It takes no time at all, and it's free. What more can you ask for?

Note: If you want to search a specific name or phrase, type it in quotation marks (ie, "walt disney world") or else you'll get hits on each individual word also.