See How Easily You Can Track What is Said About You

I wrote a post on this blog back in August about my first experience at the SES Conference. It was late that night and I had a rough draft of the post done, so instead of just saving the draft, I went ahead and published it.

At the time, I was thinking, “Hardly anyone reads my blog – it’s late – I going to just publish it.”

But, about 40 minutes after I published the post (just before I was going to call it quits for the night) I received a comment! The comment was from one of the people I meet at the conference. I had mentioned his name in the post. At first I thought, “Wow! How did he do that”? To my embarrasement, I’d even left all the spelling and grammer mistakes.

Another 10 minutes went by , and I got another comment. This time it was from a Google employee!

I was astounded! People do read my blog! But, how on earth did they find it so fast?

I came to find out that they use Bloglines or other aggregator services.

Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for collecting blogs and RSS feeds that can easily show up on your computer. It is free and easy to setup and get running. It is one of those tools that after you have it setup, you can’t imagine how you lived without it.

If you are a property manager or a real estate agent, tracking what is said about you or your company can be a powerful tool. If people are saying nice things about your services, you can join in on the conversation. And, if they are saying negative things about you, you can jump in the conversation to set things straight.

I try to read about 30 blogs, but visiting each blog everyday would be a waste of time. By using Bloglines, I can monitor each blog and get alerted on my desktop when a new blog post is available to read.

I will show you how easy it is to start tracking what people say about you, and to track what is being said about your competition. The following video (click on image below to start the video) is a screen capture movie of me narrating how to set up your Bloglines account to get the most out of it.

To further demonstrate how all this works, I am going to experiment by dropping two names to see how long it will take them to receive this post and provide a comment below. WordPress time stamps both the post and the comments so you will be able to see how fast they comment. The first person is Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal who uses an aggregator. The second person is Cameron Olthuis at Advantage Consulting Services. Cameron was a speaker at a SES session I attended in San Jose. I have not met Cameron so I have no idea if he uses an aggregator or not.

I have to apologize to each of them for using them as lab rats in this experiment? But, it’s fun, eh?! I hope they are good sports and let us know when they have read this. Thanks guys!

[tags]bloglines, real estate, property management, blogging[/tags]