How Ego Surfing Improves Your Customer Service and Personal Branding

I am a Technorati fiend. I have so many little watchlists set up to make sure I know who’s saying what about me across the blogosphere and podosphere that they have their own special category on Bloglines (ME!). But why do I do it?

If you’re not ego-surfing your company, name, brand, etc, then you’re missing out on the chance to extend your brand, to be part of the conversation, to answer any criticisms, and generally provide good service and brand building at the same time.

Technorati is the internet’s best way to see who’s saying what about you online. One or two of the guys from Technorati are coming to PodCamp this weekend, and I hope they explain a bit of what’s under the covers, because I couldn’t tell you how it works. I just know that it does a great job of telling me who said what across the web. I believe it only sniffs tags (when people assign tags either to technorati or some of the other popular tagging applications), but does anyone know differently?

But enough about that. Here’s HOW you set up your own personal digital public relations department using Technorati and Bloglines.

1. Get a Technorati account. Go to http://www.technorati.com and register.
2. Log in and select “Claim My Blog” from the upper right hand corner. (Here’s a direct link).
3. After you go through the steps there, get ready to create a watchlist.
4. Click on Watchlists from the very top of the page.
5. Type in a keyword or url to your watchlist in the search bar at the left.
6. For that step, do these: your url, variations on the url (with and without www, for instance), your name, the site’s name, anything that will ensure a hit specific to you and the brands you’re looking at, instead of all over the map.
7. One you add the searches to the watchlist, click the name of the search to open it up. At the bottom of the opened up area, you see “View in RSS format.”
8. Right-click or CTRL-click on a Mac, and select “copy link location”.
9. Open up your Bloglines account (or RSS reader of choice).
10. Select Add Feed
11. Do a Paste of the information you found.
12. Add it to a new folder, and call that folder “egosurf” or whatever. I call mine “me.”
13. Repeat for all the variations on the search that you concoct.

Other things you can add to your egosurf would include Flickr.com comments to your photos, and basically any other social networking or software site that lets you capture information in RSS format. MySpace, etc.

Now, what you can do is use this information to contact people who are talking about you or your product or whatever. I’ve been using this method to track when people talk about PodCamp. I then take a moment to leave a comment on their blog or send them email thanking them for the mention, and telling them I’m excited to get the chance to meet them. It’s a great way to extend the brand, to show them I’m watching, and to pay some attention to people giving you THEIR attention.

This isn’t just good business: it’s a necessity. How else could you see using this?