Tools for Tracking, Measuring, and Evaluating Brand's Online

Online brand-building enables  to reach beyond the people  can connect with in person and allows  to measure the impact of your actions. Since online personal-branding efforts are easier to track and measure, you can see how your brand pervades the World Wide Web. Here are five easy-to-use Web tools to help you get a handle on how powerful and prevalent your virtual personal brand is.

1. Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts)

Google Alerts notifies you via email when your name shows up on the Web, and it provides links to the reference sites so you can see exactly what's being said. 

2. TweetBeep (www.tweetbeep.com)

TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to track Twitter conversations that mention you, providing hourly updates so you can stay connected to and respond to relevant conversations. You can also track who's tweeting your website or blog.

3. Online ID Calculator (www.onlineidcalculator.com)

Tto measure the strength of one's online reputation. In doing research for our book, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand, Kirsten Dixson and I learned that when people google someone, they judge the results based on two factors: volume and relevance.

The Online ID Calculator will give you a basic understanding of your current online ID. If you use it before and after a major online personal-branding campaign, you can see how the campaign affected your score.

4. Bit.ly (www.bit.ly)

This is a great service for tracking the links that you include in your Web-based articles, blog, and Twitter posts. It's helpful because it shortens standard URLs, but its true value lies in its tracking tools.

With Bit.ly, you're able to see in real time how often your links are clicked, helping you understand the relative popularity of the items you post. It's a great way to measure which sources are most popular (use different bit.ly links for your blog and Twitter posts, for example) and which posts and links generate the greatest interest.

5. Addictomatic (www.addictomatic.com)

This is a useful tool that provides a comprehensive snapshot of how your brand shows up across many online search engines, including video search engines. Type your name in quotes (e.g., "william arruda") and see a custom page created just for you, with input from Google, Twitter, Bing, FriendFeed, Twingly, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Bloglines, Truveo, Wikio, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. You can also use Addictomatic to get a picture of what's happening on the Web in your area of expertise.

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