In measuring your reputation online, or just keeping up with what the public is saying about your company (and/or your CEO), the road less traveled could be the best route to
take. Mary Ellen Bates, principal of Bates Information Services, a research and consulting business based in Boulder, Co., recently untangled the "invisible Web" to an audience of
corporate librarians at the Special Libraries Association annual spring meeting. Like librarians, PR professionals need to make sense of a flood of information, hearsay and news.
Consider these Internet sites to get a leg up on your organization, your CEO, colleagues and competitors:
- The Groups: Check out Usenet Groups and Yahoo Groups to listen in on the conversation about trends, rumors and news.
- Blogs: Technorati.com and feedster.com should satisfy your Blog burrowing. If not, check out blogdex.net, which is MIT Media Laboratory's Weblog Diffusion Index.
- Search and Blog: Daypop.com is an excellent current events search engine that also includes blog searches.
- Less-Tapped: Get the real scoop by reading a public company's quarterly and annual earnings reports at sec.gov/edgar. Visit industry association Web sites to monitor news and
trends, plan for upcoming networking events and see who the players are. - Crisis Monitor: Go to legal publication Web sites like American Lawyer.com or Canadian Lawyer, etc for coverage of lawsuits, crises and pending litigation. Visit Labor Union
sites to see if there's a strike looming at your company or competitors. - Gossip and Hearsay: At Vault.com, hear what employees are saying about you; and they're probably saying even more at F***edcompany.com where you'll get gossip, internal memos,
rants from both existing and former employees. Type Ihate(type in your company name).com and face the music. - News & Views: Aside for your regular online news sources, Newsisfree.com is a respectable news aggregator. DrudgeReport.com provides an exhaustive number of links to the
most popular newspaper and magazine Web sites and columnists. - Specialized Search Engines: When Google is just not enough, go for the niche engines like Geniusfindcom, Teoma.com; Beaucoup.com.
- Public Records & Complaints: What are customers complaining about? Go to Dmoz.org: go to home?consumer.information.complaints to find out; At BRBpub.com, you'll find an
excellent portal for online public records. - Back in Time: The Way Back Machine at http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html archives Web pages both current and defunct; it also contains more than 10 billion Web pages
archived from 1996 through the present. - Trend Watch: Buzz.yahoo.com lists the most popular search phrases; 50.lycos.com shows the week's Top 50 searches. Go to
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html for "search patterns, trends and surprises."