How do you keep on top of everything everyone’s saying about East Dulwich, or any other subject, online?

In this series of short articles I’m going to run through a few things you can set up quickly and for free to follow what people are saying about the things you’re interested in.

This article looks at Google Alerts.

[Also in this series: Part 2 – Technorati Watchlists, Part 3 – Twitter tracking]

I’m using East Dulwich as an example, but you can do this for any number of subjects.

As well as for personal interest, these techniques are useful if you want to keep an eye on what people are writing about your industry, company, product, service, or your competition, not to mention your favourite sports team, tv programme, pop singer… So if you work in marketing, product development, corporate communication, the press office, public relations – to name but a few – take note.

Google alerts

Google Alerts is a service which emails you when it finds a new mention of your chosen subject.

So rather than you having to search for East Dulwich every now and then, you can get Google to do the searching for you.

You can have alerts sent to your preferred email address, but you’ll need a google account (free and quick to set up) if you want to edit and manage your alerts.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Visit google alerts
2. Type in the subject you want to track, e.g. East Dulwich or SE22
3. Choose the type of search you’d like. The choices are news, blogs, video, web, groups or comprehensive (an aggregate of recent results)
4. Select how often you’d like google to email you. The options are as it happens, once a day and once a week.

That’s it. Now you’ll never miss another mention of your chosen subject – as long as google picks it up of course.

You can set up as many alerts as you need.

The alerts are in the same format as the search results. They highlight where your subject is mentioned and link to the original source.