Scott Westerlaken

Over the last few months I was introduced to a great but addictive tool.  Google Alerts.  Imagine, if you will, you had a personal researcher that gave you up to the minute web status reports on any subject you wanted. Like…um…well yourself and your company.  Ok..I must admit I get a kick about seeing where my name appears but it also serves other purposes. It can give you immediate feed back on posting visibility, news reports and business opportunities. I have one “Alert” for “web video” (note you apply the search parameters as you would with a regular Google search, see end of article for more tips) that regularly gives me greater insights into industry developments and twitter/linkedin material to spread.

To get going, visit www.google.com/alerts.  Sign in or setup an account if you do not already have one (takes a couple minutes at most).  Set up your search words and how often you want your update (immediate or daily) and whether you want to be notified by email or RSS.  Simple, but addictive, so be careful!

Quick briefing on “Search Modifiers”

Looking for an explicit phrase? Use the words within quotation marks, like “phi group”.

To exclude words use the hyphen(minus) symbol. “video production”-wedding

To include similar words try the little used  “~” (known as the tilde, finally found a use for that key).  “video production”~producer

And…(yes Margaret I am starting a sentence with “and”) finally the mathematicians favorite modifier “OR”.  Video production OR producer for example.

There are others, such as site specific and file type searches but this is enough to get you going.

Would love to hear some other uses and stories for Google Alerts.

SW