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.
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.
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 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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http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=obamma
Swap the “q” Variable for your search terms. (Hint: try Advanced Search)
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Delicious Tags RSS
Delicious Recent RSS
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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. Â 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=.
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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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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 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
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.
and/or http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3afacebook.com+obamma&go=&qs=n&sk=&sc=8-21&first=11&FORM=PORE
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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.
Don’t forget to undertake data extraction, if you are more willing to take risks than we are. 🙂
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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
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.
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!
