7 Reasons Every Marketing Team Should Monitor Brand Mentions

Wait a minute… are you telling me you’re only doing brand monitoring for reputation management?! What is this, 2004? It’s time for an upgrade, not necessarily to your tools (though if you’re still using Google Alerts, OMG stop; Alertmouse is free and 100X better) but to your process. I track mentions of my name, SparkToro, our research, my investments, my other companies, and it’s invaluable in a so many ways.

Let’s start with the seven I’ve found most consistently valuable.

And sure, I’m biased. I’m a cofounder of Alertmouse, a brand-monitoring tool we built because I wanted a better way to do this work. But you can use any of the tools out there, paid, free, manually, or even vibe code your own system. Just don’t ignore the power of brand alerts for your name, company, or trends you follow/create content about; it’s too important 👇

Why do you care about tracking what people say about your name or your product name or your brand’s name on the Internet? You know, you can go ahead and run this search. Right? Run a search for your brand instead of sparked horrors, which I put in here and change in the tool setting in Google. You can say past twenty four hours or past week, and you can see all of the pages on the internet that have mentioned your brand. You might have to apply some filtering here or use some other words to get it. But people seem to be confused when I show them my alerts and I’m like, Hey, I use this every day. I need it. I’m addicted to it. It’s really important. They’re like, why? Why do you need to care what people are saying about you? Okay. So let me tell you the reasons exactly. And if you’re not using it for this, you probably should be. I don’t care what tool you’re using. You should be doing this for these reasons. Amplification is the first one. So this is a YouTube podcast. I did not know that Amanda was on the Ahrefs podcast. I didn’t know it was published today. It has some great clips. There’s some great pieces in there. I wanna amplify it. I wanna go and like it and comment on it. I wanna engage with it. The algorithm will pick that up and show it to more people. I wanna promote it in more places. Maybe we wanna include it in the newsletter. Maybe I’m gonna post about it in the blog. You’re amplifying places where you’re already getting positive attention and reach so that reaches more people and engages these algorithms that can potentially hook it. And I have seen plenty of times that something that wasn’t doing well does after you engage. Second is reasons. Super critical for AI. If you’re doing any kind of like, hey, I want to, control how my brand appears in AI tools. Well, you better start by monitoring how people are talking about your brand on the internet. Because if they’re using the right words or the wrong words, sometimes people still describe SparkToro with things that we stopped doing years ago, like the fake followers tool. I don’t know if anybody remembers that, but when we see stuff like that, we try and reach out and say like, Hey, we don’t do this anymore. This is not correct. Oftentimes, especially if it’s like a real domain with real importance and a person behind it, get it removed. Third one, media mentions. So Amanda was mentioned in ink today. She actually sent me an email about it. She was very excited. It’s great. Like it’s a great thing to put on her bio and her resume and her, website and like her profile. Right. She can say like, was quoted in ink. You know, add age too. That kind of stuff is golden for an individual. It’s also great for a brand. You’ve seen a lot of websites where they’re like, as seen in ad age, as seen in ink, as seen in Forbes, as seen in New York Times. Yes. Track those. You’re not gonna know every time you get mentioned. It’s not like the reporters need to reach out. Four is press quotes, right? So if someone has said something nice about you, the search engine journal article said something quite nice about how useful SparkToro is for solving a particular problem. We can take that quote and put it right on our site because it’s been published. We can link to it and cite it and amplify its reach and use it in our content or messaging, our conversion landing pages, our emails, all that kind of stuff. Number five, product insight. This Reddit thread, someone in here notes that they use SparkToro specifically to find content ideas. That’s not something we really promote. In fact, I probably should talk about Spark Toros use, but that’s why it’s important to track, right? Because it gives us product insight into how people are using us and talking about us publicly on the web. And speaking of, get a lot of my content ideas from stuff that surfaces in my alerts. When people say, hey, here’s this thing happening around zero click marketing, or here’s this thing happening around one of your companies like, oh yeah, you know, I should make a video about that. I should write a blog post about that. I should put up a little social post about that. So my most engaging social content has come because of an alert that came to me. And last but not least is sketchy stuff. So this TikTok links to like a fake weird version of not our website, but like, some of our research. We’ve seen a bunch of stuff like this. Sometimes you can take it, get it taken down. I have reached out because I saw a full copy of my wife’s book that someone had posted on the Web. I reached out to the publisher, Penguin Random House, and they got it removed. They had it taken down via DMCA action. Fantastic. Like, great. Now her book is not illegally on the Internet for some AI tool to clone. You can do this manually, right on the left here by performing these searches with regular cadence. Maybe you’ve got a bookmark and you just go there every day and you just check and you scroll through or you can get it automatically. Obviously I like alert mouse. I’m one of the founders. We built it. I designed the thing to have these scores so that it shows you the most important thing and filters out spam and blah, blah, blah, blah, Like all these nice features, great. You don’t have to use alert mouse. You could use mention or talk walker, or I used to use BuzzSumo before we built alert mouse. BuzzSumo is like kind of my second favorite now. Whatever you do, just don’t rely on Google alerts. It does not tell you all the mentions. It does not include all this stuff. It it seems like it should, but it doesn’t. I don’t know why it I think it the the product’s just busted and has been for years. But this is why alert tracking, in my opinion, is priceless. I honestly, I don’t know how I do my job without it.

Transcript:

Why do you care about tracking what people say about your name or your product name or your brand’s name on the Internet? You know, you can go ahead and run this search. Right? Run a search for your brand instead of sparked horrors, which I put in here and change in the tool setting in Google. You can say past twenty four hours or past week, and you can see all of the pages on the internet that have mentioned your brand. You might have to apply some filtering here or use some other words to get it.

But people seem to be confused when I show them my alerts and I’m like, Hey, I use this every day. I need it. I’m addicted to it. It’s really important.

They’re like, why? Why do you need to care what people are saying about you? Okay. So let me tell you the reasons exactly.

And if you’re not using it for this, you probably should be. I don’t care what tool you’re using. You should be doing this for these reasons. Amplification is the first one.

So this is a YouTube podcast. I did not know that Amanda was on the Ahrefs podcast. I didn’t know it was published today. It has some great clips.

There’s some great pieces in there. I wanna amplify it. I wanna go and like it and comment on it. I wanna engage with it.

The algorithm will pick that up and show it to more people. I wanna promote it in more places. Maybe we wanna include it in the newsletter. Maybe I’m gonna post about it in the blog.

You’re amplifying places where you’re already getting positive attention and reach so that reaches more people and engages these algorithms that can potentially hook it. And I have seen plenty of times that something that wasn’t doing well does after you engage. Second is reasons. Super critical for AI.

If you’re doing any kind of like, hey, I want to, control how my brand appears in AI tools. Well, you better start by monitoring how people are talking about your brand on the internet. Because if they’re using the right words or the wrong words, sometimes people still describe SparkToro with things that we stopped doing years ago, like the fake followers tool. I don’t know if anybody remembers that, but when we see stuff like that, we try and reach out and say like, Hey, we don’t do this anymore.

This is not correct.

Oftentimes, especially if it’s like a real domain with real importance and a person behind it, get it removed.

Third one, media mentions. So Amanda was mentioned in ink today. She actually sent me an email about it. She was very excited.

It’s great. Like it’s a great thing to put on her bio and her resume and her, website and like her profile. Right. She can say like, was quoted in ink.

You know, add age too.

That kind of stuff is golden for an individual. It’s also great for a brand. You’ve seen a lot of websites where they’re like, as seen in ad age, as seen in ink, as seen in Forbes, as seen in New York Times. Yes.

Track those. You’re not gonna know every time you get mentioned. It’s not like the reporters need to reach out. Four is press quotes, right?

So if someone has said something nice about you, the search engine journal article said something quite nice about how useful SparkToro is for solving a particular problem. We can take that quote and put it right on our site because it’s been published. We can link to it and cite it and amplify its reach and use it in our content or messaging, our conversion landing pages, our emails, all that kind of stuff.

Number five, product insight. This Reddit thread, someone in here notes that they use SparkToro specifically to find content ideas. That’s not something we really promote. In fact, I probably should talk about Spark Toros use, but that’s why it’s important to track, right? Because it gives us product insight into how people are using us and talking about us publicly on the web.

And speaking of, get a lot of my content ideas from stuff that surfaces in my alerts. When people say, hey, here’s this thing happening around zero click marketing, or here’s this thing happening around one of your companies like, oh yeah, you know, I should make a video about that. I should write a blog post about that. I should put up a little social post about that.

So my most engaging social content has come because of an alert that came to me. And last but not least is sketchy stuff. So this TikTok links to like a fake weird version of not our website, but like, some of our research. We’ve seen a bunch of stuff like this.

Sometimes you can take it, get it taken down. I have reached out because I saw a full copy of my wife’s book that someone had posted on the Web. I reached out to the publisher, Penguin Random House, and they got it removed. They had it taken down via DMCA action.

Fantastic. Like, great. Now her book is not illegally on the Internet for some AI tool to clone. You can do this manually, right on the left here by performing these searches with regular cadence.

Maybe you’ve got a bookmark and you just go there every day and you just check and you scroll through or you can get it automatically. Obviously I like alert mouse. I’m one of the founders. We built it.

I designed the thing to have these scores so that it shows you the most important thing and filters out spam and blah, blah, blah, blah, Like all these nice features, great. You don’t have to use alert mouse. You could use mention or talk walker, or I used to use BuzzSumo before we built alert mouse. BuzzSumo is like kind of my second favorite now.

Whatever you do, just don’t rely on Google alerts. It does not tell you all the mentions. It does not include all this stuff. It it seems like it should, but it doesn’t. I don’t know why it I think it the the product’s just busted and has been for years. But this is why alert tracking, in my opinion, is priceless. I honestly, I don’t know how I do my job without it.