One More Reason to Listen

If you’re responsible for a brand, a Web site, a campaign or a business of any kind, you know you should be listening, don’t you?

Listening goes well beyond reputation monitoring and it’s time that fact was noted. In an era of blogging and splogging, listening is an excellent way (in fact, on of the few ways, although there are others) to protect and to keep track of your content.

If you’re a publisher, a blogger or anyone else who creates original content and posts it to the Web, you should immediately set up a Technorati search for all your domains and key words and phrases that are unique to your site, brand or product. The names of products or executives are a good place to start. (You can do this on the search engines, too, but Technorati’s feed function is fantastic.) Subscribe to the feeds for those searches. You may be surprised at what you learn.

Not only will you know who’s talking about you and what they’re saying, if you create original content you’ll know who’s using that content and how. This morning I uncovered (yet another) “business blog” created entirely of ClickZ content.

Is dealing with this stuff a pain in the butt? You bet. But wouldn’t you rather know than not know who’s saying what about you — not to mention who’s stealing your ideas and your property?