Doing business online means being too busy to spend more time on research than is really needed. If you’re not careful you can end up “doing research” or looking up your competition all day long instead of actually doing something.

But luckily there’s Google Alerts to free up your time if you’d like to know what’s happening with a particular company, or even its specific officers. It’s really pretty crazy as it acts as a virtual spy tool, and it works like this:

You enter any search string you want to spy on, select how often you want to be notified of changes, and enter your email address where Google would send you updates. You can separate by News, Blogs, Video, General, etc.. You can also state if you want to get notices as they happen, once a day, or once a week.

So let’s say your competitor’s CEO is named Joe Shmoman. You make an alert with his name if you are that type of a stalker, and just wait for Google to track anything that happens online with his name on it (assuming those pages don’t set to block Google’s spiders of course). Videos, blogs, news releases, comments in industry blogs, etc..

In this way Google Alerts can really give you an insight into what the person is doing, where he may be lurking, and what he may be upto. Not that I do anything like that This is also good for link building purposes - you can have alerts on competitors’ websites and you’ll get a decent update on who is talking about them and where. Sometimes you find a place that links to them in a directory, which you can instantly go to and make sure they link to you too.

I mostly keep track of a few companies, and I get to see all their staged press-releases - which otherwise nobody finds anyway in my opinion. But it’s a good way of being notified without me having to spend a lot of time actually scanning numerous sources, let Google do it for you.

The trick is setting up the alerts in such a way as to avoid generic results. For example if the person’s name is John David, well good luck figuring out which one it will be.

Gripes:

My biggest gripe about Google Alerts is that often it gives very stale information too, as it suddenly finds something that I already saw even a year or two ago. That and it seems to repeat those old things from time to time.