Brand Monitoring is scanning the web to find out what is being said about your company, your product, your service or anything else connected with your business.

Knowing what people say about us is crucial to identify opportunities for engagement and put our Mantras into practice.

In the past we used to use RSS for this, but since it pretty much died when Google killed Google Reader, we've had to look for other ways to monitor our brand.

TweetDeck

One very important channel to monitor for us is Twitter. We've used it since day one — actually, two months before day one 😉 — and we receive a lot of mentions there.

To monitor it, we mostly use TweetDeck. We use it as our main Twitter client in our browser, so we can see things as they come in real time.

HelpScout and Slack integrations

Whenever we can, we set up integrations so that messages left on our social media (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) come to us, instead of us having to go find them.

We set up integrations to HelpScout and to Slack, either directly or via Zapier.

Google Alerts

One little-known tool that we've used since day one is Google Alerts. It's very simple: you put in your brand name, set it to be delivered "At most once a day", and every morning you get an email from Google with a list of mentions they found around the web for your brand.

The results are often low quality, but it takes zero effort and if something important comes out about you, it will find it for sure.

Mention

For a period of time, we used Mention to track any mention of our brand across the web.

We checked it weekly for "Balsamiq", "myBalsamiq", "UX Apprentice", etc.

It was powerful, but time-consuming. We had to discard a bunch of links that we don't care about: license key cracks, job postings requiring Balsamiq as a skill, fake blog or Twitter spam... it also got too expensive for what we needed.

What we liked about Mention:

• It finds a lot of content everywhere, even articles where your brand name is misspelled or not explicitly mentioned (for example, a short-link to your website).
• It sometimes finds out old articles, and this can help you fill in some blanks in your records.
• You can also "teach" Mention to block some sources for the future, in case they're not interesting at all.
• The UI is pretty nice and it's enjoyable to use both from desktop and tablet or phone.

Pinboard

For many years we used to track every mention we found and categorize them in a database of links. This activity is called social bookmarking. At first we used Delicious, then Pinboard.

Then we decided that it wasn't worth our time. It took too long to add and categorize each mention, and we barely ever looked at the database.

What we liked about Pinboard:

• It's simple to use thanks to its Chrome extension.
• It's minimalist on purpose, to make the design light and the information density high.
• We especially liked that we could add notes. We used them by copy-pasting some text: it's an easy way to keep some nice words alive, even if their web page won't exist anymore (it happens all the time.)

Do you do Brand Monitoring? What tools do you use?