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Feb. 25, 2008 at 9:45pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox
Andy Beal Launches Trackur For Monitoring Online Reputation
When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually, or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you.
Now you have a third choice. Andy Beal, who specializes in online reputation management, has launched a site called Trackur that enables you to set up monitoring across a variety of sites on a set of keywords at a much lower price than reputation management firms generally charge.
Trackur has three packages available:
- Standard: $88 per month for one search that updates twice a day.
- Pro: $188 per month for five searches that update every six hours.
- Enterprise: $388 per month for 15 searches that update every hour.
How does Trackur differ from the more expensive offerings? It’s reporting only, so any consulting or work on improving reputation management is at an extra cost.
How does it differ from searches you can set up yourself? On first glance, it doesn’t appear all that different. If you don’t want the hassle of setting up something manually and creating custom reports, it may be worthwhile. This product seems to be geared at companies who aren’t skilled in determining online reputation rather than at SEOs who likely have custom solutions set up already. For instance, in addition to easily setting up Google Alerts, you can set up a Twitter search using Terraminds and then subscribe to that searching via RSS.
Andy Beal said of Trackur's value over using something like Google Alerts:
Trackur goes beyond just Google content. It tracks images, videos, Digg, del.icio.us, Twitter, as well as the usual news and blog stuff. Users can view their results using a cool AJAX enabled interface and get updates via email or RSS. You can save multiple searches, add filter keywords, save discovered items, and sort the results the way you want. Google Alerts, can't do any of that!
The site doesn’t say exactly what sources it tracks, although it does include sites such as Digg and Delicious. It would be helpful to know the full set of sources, so that you could know what sources may be missing and may need checking in on separately. The report does show you where it pulls the information it finds, which is very useful in joining the conversation about your brand.
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By Vanessa Fox
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