Participating in Consumer Generated Media (CGM) is pivotal to your Shoestring Branding™ strategy. Through clever, responsible and consistent use of CGM like:

• blogs
• forums and discussion groups
• social bookmarking sites
• social networks and
• review sites

you will slowly but surely position yourself as an expert in your niche and build your brand.

As your brand gains mindshare, other people will also use CGM to talk about you. Some will give you positive reviews while others may complain. Either way, listening to what other people have to say about your brand is important not only from a reputation management standpoint, but also because it may open your eyes to ways you can improve your value proposition.

While maintaining a large staff or hiring an expensive PR firm to monitor the buzz around their brands may be common among large corporations, as a small business shoestring marketer you don’t have that luxury. Fortunately, however, you can leverage these powerful web tools freely available to you to track your brand in CGM:

Email Alerts:

You can use Google Alerts to receive email updates of the latest Google results for your choice of query or topic (in this case, your brand name). Signing up for an alert is easy and involves these five short steps:

1. Go to Goggle Alerts.
2. Type your brand name in the search box.
3. Determine the type of media you want to track (I recommend setting it as “comprehensive”so that you can track websites, news sites, blogs, videos and groups).
4. Choose how often you want to receive the alerts (I recommend once a day), and
5. Enter your email address.

You can also sign up for a similar service from Yahoo! Alerts.

RSS Feeds:

Instead of using email, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of the search results page for your brand. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the technology used to send updated feeds from blogs, search engines and websites to your preferred news reader or agregatior (you can use Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, etc.).

To receive RSS feeds for search results related to your brand go to Google or Yahoo! , do a search for your brand and click on the different options: News, Videos, Blogs, etc. Look for the RSS symbol or text link and subscribe.

You can also use RSS to track blog comments in Technorati (the most important blog search engine), and to monitor your brand in the largest social bookmarking services: Delicious and Digg.

Tracking blogs in Technorati:

Go to: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tags/yourbrand ( or if your brand has two words: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tags/your+brand ) and click on the orange RSS icon to subscribe to a feed that will let you know when Technorati detects that a blogger has posted a comment about your brand.

Tracking Social Bookmarking Sites:

• Delicious: Go to: http://del.icio.us/tag/yourbrand (or if your brand has two words: http://del.icio.us/tag/your+brand ) and click on the orange RSS button at the bottom of the page to subscribe to a feed that will let you know when someone has bookmarked a site tagged with your brand name.
• Digg: Go to digg.com and search for your brand name. In the results page look for the orange RSS icon to the right of the page, next to the first result.

What else can you track?

The possibilities are endless and limited only by your creativity and availability of time. You can track, among other things:

• Competitor brands
• Industry news and trends
• Consumer reviews of your products in amazon.com
• Your own name
• Competitor job postings (sign up for monster.com job search agent to receive them automatically by email)
• What people are saying about you in social networking sites like mySpace (set up a Google Alert for myspace-specific pages by typing: site:myspace.com yourbrand as the alert search terms).

Del.icio.us / Digg / Stumble it!

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