I've been playing around with Google alerts for a little
while, seeing as how I volunteered myself to fill in this part of
the Shameless Secrets/ 90 Day Reputation Challenge Strategy
from
Adreynn Ashley.
Ok ,so I set an alert for Sean Nelson.
This is what comes up most often :
Nice guy, noteworthy actor, screenwriter and director ;
Makes much more $$ than I ever dreamed of; Has worked
with everybody,
but
not exactly what I had in mind.
If I ask like this : "Sean Nelson" -film
then things look much more relevant,
but.
See what another of my alter egos has been up to ...
(http://socialmediasonar.com/about-social-media-sonar-and-sonar-connects )
In order to avoid picking up this one, I need to add
two other terms (-surge -sonar) to avoid my namesake
in Atlanta. I'm not using twitter much, although some
of my clones are, so I need to quash that too.
So my alert now looks like :
"Sean Nelson" -film -surge -sonar -site:twitter
This still picks up a white-trash murder on the Bayou
and a teenager (or few )on Face Book (Which reminds
me that I'll need to put a face on my face book account.),
but not very much and little that is not obviously irrelevant.
That is what I've put in play.
Once a week.
Send the email Luke.
And I can do the same for companies I want follow,
genuine topics of interest, ex girlfriends I need to avoid,
and so on.
Details on how top accomplish all this without
asking Google all about it follow below.
===============================================
Here's how alerts work
(shamelessly plagiarized from Google themselves) :
Set Up :
Go to your Google account and select ALERTS !!
1. enter a query that you're interested in : WordSmith
and test your search criteria.
2. Google Alerts will check regularly to see if there are
any new results for your query.
3. If there are new results, Google Alerts sends them to
you in an email.
Alert Management :
Users with Google Accounts can view, create, edit and delete their alerts using the "Manage your Alerts" page.
You can create a Google Account for any email address.
You can manage alerts for more than one email address by adding your other email address to your existing Google Account. To add an email address to your Google Account, visit your Google account page and use the "Email addresses" section.
To change the format of your emails from HTML to plain text, you'll need to sign in to your Google Account and go to the "Manage your Alerts" page.
Please note that Video Alerts require you to receive email in HTML format.
Creating Effective Alerts :
* Monitor a product: Enter a product name in quotes
to receive a daily email with the latest news, blogs
and web results about your product.
Example: [ "Google Alerts" ]
* Find out what's being said about you: Enter your full name
in quotes to receive an email when news
stories, blogs or web pages mention your name.
Example: [ "Joe Bloggs" ]
o If you have a common name, you can use negative terms
to remove irrelevant results.
For example, if you have the same name as a professional
football player, try adding -football to your query.
Example: [ "Joe Bloggs" -football ].
o If you get a lot of results from a site that you aren't
interested in, you can exclude results from
that site. For example, if you don't want results from
twitter.com, add [ -site:twitter.com ] to your query.
Example: [ "Joe Bloggs" -site:twitter.com ].
* Keep up with the news: to get a daily email full of news
on a topic you're interested in, enter the
topic in quotes. Example: [ "global warming" ]
o If you only want results from newspapers, change
the "Type" field from "Everything" to "News".
o If you want more results, use the "Email length" field
to increase the number of results in each email.
o If you want results as soon as possible, change the
"How often" field from "once a day" to "as-it
-happens". You may receive multiple emails per day with this
setting.
Tips
* Try to be as precise as possible. The more precise your
search terms are, the more relevant your
alerts will be.
* Use quotes around words if you are looking for them together.
Examples:
o "white house Obama "
o "Mike Smith"
* Use a minus sign (-) in front of words that you want to exclude.
Examples:
o paris -texas
o apple -fruit
* Put a plus sign (+) immediately before a word to match that
word precisely as you typed
it, excluding synonyms and spelling variations.
Examples:
o +foard (to stop Google including results for Ford)
o Michael +Jacson (to stop Google including results for
Michael Jackson)
* Use the site: operator to limit your search to specific sites.
Examples:
o physics site:.edu
o congress site:nytimes.com
* Use the site: operator with a dash to exclude specific sites.
Example:
o "joe bloggs" -site:twitter.com to avoid items from twitter.
