…and Blogging About You, Posting Pictures of You, and Tweeting About You on the Internet.

You may be thinking right now, “Nope. No one’s talking about me on the Internet.” That could be true, but even if no one is talking about you today, they may indeed be talking about you tomorrow.

Why are the odds so great that you’re being talked about on line? Because so many people are out there chatting to one another. More than ever, we are interconnected via the Internet with endless conversations happening every moment of every day. What are the odds no one is talking about you? Pretty slim – especially if you’re in business, if you have a blog or a website, or if you have a LinkedIn, Facebook, My Space or Twitter account.

So How Do You Know?

That’s where the ubiquity of the Internet works in your favor. There is one company that indexes and categorizes almost every piece of information that hits the web: Google. And Google has an awesome little tool called “Google Alerts“.

Google Alerts lets you put in your name, your business name or any other search criteria you can think of and if anyone, anywhere on the web posts anything with that criteria in it, you get an email.

It’s About Protecting Your On-Line Reputation

These days it is imperative to keep up with the conversations going on about you or that you are mentioned in. You must protect your online reputation at all costs. Why? Because people tend to believe what they read on line and if only one disgruntled customer or jilted client posts something bad about you, that’s what your prospects will find. It’s inevitable.

So do yourself a big favor, monitor yourself and your business through Google Alerts. Answer detractors – making sure to keep your message positive and not personal – on either your blog or the blog where the sleight occurred.

And if you find a bunch of fans saying good stuff about you, well you’ll want to know and respond to that as well.

The technology is there, and it’s free. So the question is not why should you subscribe to Google Alerts – the question is: Why not?

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