If you discovered somebody in your neighbourhood was spreading bad rumours about you, your company, your products or services you would most likely want to do something about it. Managing your online profile these days is just as important as managing your ‘offline’ reputation or profile — perhaps even more so. After all, there are a lot more potential customers and people, in general online than in your neighbourhood.

Google Alerts can help you keep up with the ‘buzz’ about you, your company, your products or services online; as well as your competitors.

Once you set up Google Alerts, every time your specified search terms appear you will automatically receive an email notifying you. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feedreader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page).

To set up alerts for your business go to https://www.google.com/alerts.

TIP — We recommend you specify, “as it happens,” for frequency and ‘comprehensive’ as the parameters.

We also recommend you put quotes around searches with multiple keywords to avoid being sent irrelevant alerts i.e. instead of ‘orange juice’ which will likely feature you may prefer to specify ‘ted’s orange juice’ as this is more specific & relevant to your business.

You can create up to 1000 alerts. See this page for FAQs related to alerts – https://www.google.com/support/alerts/