Tracking Blog Posts & Comments about You, Your Firm, Clients, Competitors, Employees, Jurors, Experts, & More

Tracking what people say on blogs can be important to legal professionals for a number of reasons:
  • Image Monitoring – What are people saying about you, your firm, your clients?
  • Competitive Intelligence – What are people saying about the competition?
  • Personnel – What is being said by and about potential employees?
  • Litigation – What is the buzz about your case and your clients?; are your jurors or expert witnesses blogging or commenting on other blogs?
Fortunately, there are some tools you can use to track this information. Google Blogs is a search engine for blog content. Using the subscribe options on the left of the search results page, you can set up an email alert or RSS feed so that you’ll be notified if your search terms appear in any new blog posts. That works well for people who have their own blogs, but what about those who leave comments to other people’s blogs? That is a bit trickier – or at least it used to be. I just learned about a new comment search engine called BackType. backtype.gif With BackType, you have two search options:
  • Search People – search blog comments from all over the web or search for comments left by individual people. Think of this as comments “from”
  • Search Comments – search blog comments matching any keyword, including a name. This of this as comments “about”
To track future comments, subscribe to the RSS feed on your BackType search results page. Source: MakeUseOf.com