U Click Pick of the Week: Google Alerts

Is an agency blog monitoring service way out of your budget?
A free way to comprehensively monitor the blogosphere is to use Google Alerts. By
setting up Google Alerts, you can track every Internet mention of your organization.
You can also set up alerts to track your competitors or receive industry news.

Like other Google tools, Google Alerts is very easy to set
up. Simply type in the keywords or phrases you’d like to track, select what
types of content you would like to track (i.e., news, web, blogs, video and/or
groups), select how often you would like to be alerted and then provide your
e-mail address. It takes only a few minutes to set this up.

The e-mail alerts resemble Google search results for new Web
pages mentioning your keywords. Just click on the link to view the blog post,
article or video that mentioned your organization. In next week’s U Click Pick,
I’ll write about how to organize these alerts so everyone in the organization
can quickly access them.