Ever check out Glassdoor? “Anonymous salaries, company reviews, and interview questions and reviews for over 70,000 companies – all for free!” (And for all to see!) What about the thoughts, opinions and musings galore that are out there on social media sites? What are people saying about your company, its people and what it’s really like to work there?
Inquiring HR minds (and job seekers) want to know! So how in the world do they go about finding out?
A great way to get started is to set up Google Reader to gather RSS subscriptions from some of the free media monitoring sites that are out there. Before your eyes glaze over from fear that this post is going to start getting “too technical” for you, don’t worry. You are likely halfway there if you’ve got a Gmail account.
Once you set up a free account with Google, you’ll be able to experience all the joys of Google Reader – a place to aggregate and organize all of your search results in one spot. It’s really as easy as 1, 2, 3.
- Go to a free media monitoring site of your choosing.
- Enter your search terms.
- Click on the RSS feed icon to subscribe to a continuous feed of the search results.
That’s it. Once you click that RSS button your search agent is set.
The list of free media monitoring tools is a long one and new options are cropping up all the time. So if you are already playing around with these to keep on top of things, please share your favorites. Here are just a few that I think are worth checking out:
Social Mention is one of the best. They live up to their word: “It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc,” Another plus, in addition to delivering real-time results, Social Mention also provides a social ranking score on strength, sentiment, passion and reach with each and every search. Already familiar with Google Alerts? Social Mention can also send Social Mention Alerts right to your email.
Twitter Search’s shpeil: “See what’s happening – right now.” Simply put, this tool is a great way to isolate tweets based on keywords.
Google Blog Search focuses only on the blogosphere. Use it to “find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice” through an index that is continually updated on blogs written not just in English, but many other languages too.
Technorati, BackType and BoardTracker are a few more for you to check out.
The reputation that precedes an organization can make or break their pipeline to top talent. While these tools may be at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to analyzing your brand’s rep (your competitor’s, industry trends, etc…), when you listen you are sure to learn.
