Weekend Warrior Wrapup It's All About This Weekend

One of my favorite books on blogging and social networking is Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. In it they give this helpful action step of building a listen station to monitor your company, brand or name on the web. If you don't know what other people are saying about you then how can you know the appropriate actions steps to move you, your brand or company forward?

Thanks Chris & Julien for helping us become better "Trust Agents".

1. If you do not already have one, set up a Gmail account at www.gmail.com. This allows you access to all the various free Google applications. (We like to call accounts like these “passports,” because they let you open many tools.)

2. Go to www.google.com/reader. This will become your listening station.

3. Go to www.technorati.com. Type your name, in quotes, into the search bar.

4. When the results page comes up, right-click on the little orange RSS button and select Copy-Link Location.

5. Go back to Google Reader, click the blue plus button (+), and paste what you copied into there (either right-click paste or use CTRL-V for Windows, CMD-V for Macs)

Repeat these steps for as many different terms as you might want to search for (your company, your product, your competitors).

For the bonus round, go to http://blogsearch.gloogle.com and do the same searches. Then go to http://search.twitter.com and search there, too. Add all these things back into your listening post, and search for other ways to do the same thing. Are you likely to show up on YouTube? Do a search there. Anything new come out that we haven’t mentioned? Check there too.

If you end up with too much in one big pile, Google Reader allows you to build folders. You can start out by labeling one “me” and one “them.” It might help you sort.