We got this question last week and thought I would quickly answer it here.
Google Alerts is a great free service that scours the internet for mentions of keywords that interest you and then they ‘alert’ you when the terms you are tracking are found.
You can set up to receive the alerts as they happen, daily or weekly. For example if I wanted, I could make a Google Alert for the term “Social Media Breakfast Maine” and when we were mentioned, I would be alerted. This is a really easy way to see if people are writing blogs about you, there is news about you or just to see if people are talking about you.
So the question was, are those terms case sensitive. The answer is no. Upper case, lower case… doesn’t matter.
So go ahead. Set up Google Alerts for your name, your company, maybe even your competitors names or common misspellings of your name.
A few tips:
- Always put quotation marks around the query you are setting up the alert for. That way you will get the exact match for that phrase.
- Set up the digests to come to you weekly or daily but most likely setting them us as they happen will be unnecessary and very distracting.
Good luck and happy monitoring!





Our friend, Rob Gould, has just started a new blog for the Press Herald called
Foursquare recently and quietly updated their privacy policy. You can 
