Posted on September 30th, 2010

Satellite dish blasts RSS feeds.

Google.com/alerts has been the reputation monitoring rage for years now.  Most companies seem to feel safe under the Google alert notification blanket. It’s true that Google alerts keep reputation managers apprised of a lot of content, conversations, news, media, etc… However, Google alerts alone are far from a complete picture of what’s going on out there.  Social media “updates” can take days or even weeks to show up, if at all.  Don’t get caught unaware. This post offers a guerrilla list of RSS feeds, crucial for monitoring one’s reputation, can be used to mine extremely fast alerts from major sites including YouTube, Google, Facebook & Twitter.

Understanding Google Alerts

There’s a relatively new function in the alerts tool to preview alert-email content. Click on the “Preview results” link, change the “Email length” to “up to 50 results” and have a look to the right.  Toggle the “Type” from “Discussions” to “News,” etc… Test keywords you’re familiar with and take note of what’s not there. Google Alerts tell us what Google wants us to know about and are far from fully comprehensive.

Set up Google alerts.

Anyone a) depending solely on Google Alerts b) has Tweetdeck open c) cares about their reputation, knows that “as it happens” in this case does not mean instant. The big-kid tool making companies drill into individual APIs, aggregate them, alert reputation managers and make pretty sentiment reports.  These crucial reputation-monitoring APIs are easily accessible, in most cases, by a basic understanding of URL variables and RSS feeds. Compare the data you cull to Google alerts and you’ll find quick perspective on what content and activity has been missing from daily reputation screenings, threat and opportunity assessment.

We hope you enjoy subscribing to, filtering, monitoring and reporting on the RSS feeds highlighted here.  You’ll find that, when properly accessed and rules applied, they represent one of the fastest methods on earth to access the latest chatter.

10 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Remember that these links all are RSS feeds, therefore might not parse properly in your web browser. They are meant for pasting into RSS readers like GoogleReader, iGoogle, etc…

When URLs on this page resolve to a normal web page, just grab the feed from the URL bar at the top of your browser.

Grab the feed icon from the URL bar at the top of your browser.

Google Alerts remain an important staple of reputation monitoring.  There’s a great tutorial for reducing Google alerts to feeds in our post “How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard.”

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YouTube logo

YouTube RSS Feeds Users & Tags

RSS feeds for searches, tags or users, are easily accessible enter the username or tag as specified in the URLs below.

Tags RSS:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos/-/[insert tagname here]?client=ytapi-youtube-browse&v=2

To  create an RSS feed for the tag “monkey”, enter:  http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos/-/monkey?client=ytapi-youtube-browse&v=2

Full-text searches RSS:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?q=[insert url-encoded search term here]&client=ytapi-youtube-search&v=2

To create an RSS feed for the search term “gerbil”, enter:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?q=gerbil&client=ytapi-youtube-search&v=2

Users RSS:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[insert username here]/uploads
To create an RSS feed for the user “YouTube,” enter:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/youtube/uploads

More YouTube preset RSS feeds, perfect for offline filtering

Recently Added, Recently Featured, Top Favorites, Top Favorites Today, Top-Rated

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Twitter logo
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=obamma

Swap the “q” Variable for your search terms. (Hint: try Advanced Search)

Twitter Search Results

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Delicious logo

Delicious Tags RSS

Delicious Specific User RSS

Delicious Popular RSS

Delicious Recent RSS

Look Up A Specific URL RSS

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Digg logo

Digg Sucks. Sure the former giant of all SMO giants still offers their preset categories Technology, World & Business, Science, Gaming, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Sports , Offbeat RSS. However, as part of the site killing overlapping gee-we’re-cooler-than-the-room and “we hate our power users” redesigns, Digg has eliminated it’s search RSS feeds.  Still, take the main or category feeds from Digg.com and filter it after downloading each latest article.

You could always scrape this page using mozenda, to DB, then generate the feed from the dataset http://digg.com/search?q=palin&submit=.

Results from Digg

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http://code.reddit.com/wiki/API RSS

http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=jonas+brothers RSS

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Friend Feed logo

Search RSS http://friendfeed.com/search?q=jonas+brothers&format=atom

Since FriendFeed aggregates social channels already represented in this list,  obviously duplicates will be generated. We have FF on our  as another standalone measure of “buzz.”

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Facebook logo

Facebook is a crazy-egg cluster F__k for reputation managers.  Google indexes updates to Fan Pages but not opted-in personal walls. Bing.com/social indexes both, but not always on the mid and long tails of activity.  Both Bing & YourOpenBook.org are easily scrapeable using mozenda.

Individual Fan Pages RSS Feeds are available from Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=18807449704

Mashable's Facebook Wall RSS

Scraping Opportunities For Personal Facebook Updates & Fan Pages
First, scraping Facebook pages violates their terms of services. Don’t do it.  Also, like Google and Bing, Facebook is the worst of those sites that work to prevent data extraction.

However, if you want the same data without pissing off FB, then scrape http://youropenbook.org/?q=jonas+brothers&gender=any.

Openbook profile

and/or http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3afacebook.com+obamma&go=&qs=n&sk=&sc=8-21&first=11&FORM=PORE

Bing site search of Facebook for Obama terms results

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Yelp logo

In major American cities, Yelp makes reviews available.  Filter these feeds for a great look at any emerging sentiment of Yelpers.  Other cities require scraping.

RSS reviews are “fed” for the following markets:

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Forsquare only offers personal feeds and are in Beta.   They’re of negligible value at this time in our opinion for monitoring. However we’re keeping a close eye and willing to dive into individuals as the data becomes more important.  If we were willing to violate FourSquare’s TOS, scraping is super-duper easy. We have FourSquare on the list because of the emergent nature of geo-location social media marketing technology.

FourSquare feeds

Don’t forget to undertake data extraction, if you are more willing to take risks than we are. 🙂

filters

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board reader logo
Board reader has relationships with and indexes a huge group of  forums and offers content that may not be indexed on Google.

Posts RSS http://boardreader.com/rss/seo.html?p=20&format=RSS2.0
Yuku RSS http://boardreader.com/rss/seo.html?src=yuku&p=20&format=RSS2.0

MicroBlogs RSS http://boardreader.com/rss/seo.html?src=tw&p=20&format=RSS2.0

Graphs http://boardreader.com/trendy/seo.html

Language filter

Note the international segmenting in SERPs.

BoardReader’s Advanced Search options and corresponding RSS feeds make interesting SERPs, for the ability to pre-filter queries.

Sorting by relevance on board reader

GoogleAlerts have become the defacto standard alert system for reputation managers. Still, this tool is far from total. it’s easy to aggregate feeds, filter them, send alerts and otherwise analyze the data. While high-cost tools are excellent at creating pretty reports, that’s not where we look for the fastest alerts on the Internet. We have access to nearly all the same data, absent a few deals certain players have with sites like Facebook.

In many cases these feeds, checked every 30-60 seconds and/or within the source’s suggested guidelines, yield incredibly fast alerts.  Though alerts are repeated as they show up in additional channels, this insight is useful in itself.  Happy feed hunting everybody!

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  • Mati

    A good reminder about Google. Love a post that gives you actionable steps that can be applied today. Thanks

    • Marty Weintraub

      @Mati: We’re glad the post resonated and thanks for the comment. Will you be at #SMX NYC next week?

  • Juliette Cowall

    I’m glad that Angie’s List wasn’t included. I’m afraid they’re going to go through what Yelp did earlier. When we chose not to advertise, a (negative) review came up dated May 2010, but the reviewer noted that the work we performed was in 1999. It seems odd that someone would wait more than 10 years to post a review.

  • Nihad

    great post and i love the steps that explain everything

  • Michelle Ross

    Great information! Makes me want to dig deeper and see how this works for the “average joe.” Reputation Monitoring is quickly becoming a hot button issue for the general public just like Identity Protection.

  • Paul Sherland

    Thanks for the list of resources to monitor reputation information online. Lots of people I talk to think that Google Alerts will cover them if anyone posts reputation information anywhere online, and as you point out, that’s not true.

    However, for local businesses, there are no good tools for monitoring reviews left at Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps, Kudzu, Angie’s List, Insiderpages, Citysearch, Dealerrater, AVVO, etc. Google Alerts does not serve up these reviews in searches for a local business name, and other tools I’ve tested like GetListed.org, the Marchex Beta Reputation Monitor, and Techrigy’s SM2 do a partial job, but don’t seem to gather all of the reviews online. I still manually search Google, Yahoo, and Bing for my clients to see if new reviews have been posted to the major business listing sites. If anyone has tested and uses reliable tools for monitoring local business reviews, I’d be very interested in your experience.

  • Greg Uhrlen

    Great to see “How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard” by Marty Weintraub being recognized in this blog. We recommend this particular blog to tech-savvy clients who want to be empowered during the SEO process by building their own Online Reputation Management dashboard.

  • Eddie

    I agree with Michelle Ross, reputation management is so huge right now. When you have a limited budget and perform a specific service you must be able to determine where you can leverage your business in the marketplace and reputation management is an affordable and effective way to do so.