Are you monitoring your online employer brand?

In a competitive market, your online employer brand could determine whether talented individuals join your organisation, or go to your competition.

In a competitive market, your online employer brand could determine whether talented individuals join your organisation, or go to your competition.

So are you regularly monitoring your online reputation as a top employer? What do people find when they search online for information about working for your organisation? Is it what you want to hear? Is it what you expect?

The fact of the matter is that people are already talking about your organisation online. From jobseekers to employees (and ex-employees), they are all people who have had a personal experience of your organisation and your employer brand.

Social media effectively makes your employer brand available 24/7 so online brand monitoring is an essential task.

There are many paid applications out there for monitoring brand reputation, but to help get you started, we’ve outlined 5 free (and very simple) applications/websites which will have you tracking conversation about your employer brand in minutes:

5 free applications to monitor your employer brand:

1. Google alerts. Free alerts which allow you to monitor brand terms & key words associated with your organisation. Simply set up a Google Alert for your brand name and everytime someone publishes a news article or blog post mentioning your organisation, you’ll receive an email containing a link to the article or post!
2. Technorati. The largest blog search engine in the world and quite simply the best resource for tracking blogger conversations about your brand. Simply, search for your organisations name on Technorati to see who’s blogging about you right now
3. Twitter Search. Use Twitter search to monitor brand chatter across the Twitter network. You could also try monitoring any instances of your careers website URL or career fairs etc
4. Friendfeed. A social media aggregator that pulls data from various social accounts (e.g. YouTube, Twitter and Flickr) into a single feed allowing you to conduct searches on your brand name throughout all social networks at once.
5. Social Mention. A social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services (e.g. Twitter). You can also set up free daily email alerts to monitor your brand – just like Google Alerts but for social media!

Note: All of these sites also allow you to subscribe to your results by RSS or email to help you easily monitor any instances of your employer brand.

So what do you with all this information? Well, this depends on your overall goals but you could use it to engage with people talking about your organisation, learn where you can build more value, discover potential new employees and maybe even connect with old colleagues.

Hopefully these free tools will provide a potential starter kit for employer brand monitoring and used just once or twice a week should be more than enough to learn exactly whos talking about your organisation.

Many thanks

Carl Freelove
jobs.ac.uk