Today, bloggers are a main source of news for millions of readers. Their articles are often better researched, more detailed, and more honest than newspaper or magazine articles. They may also be completely false, as bloggers do not fall under the editorial scrutiny that traditional media adheres to. When something negative is said about our company through a blog, we may not find out about it until it has spread to hundreds of websites, doing extensive damage to our company’s image, whether or not the information is true. To combat this, we must use technology to keep an eye on what is being written about our company. What you must know about using Technorati to find out what people are writing about us:
- Technorati is a search engine designed specifically to search for blogs on the internet.
- Technorati uses three searches: 1) keywords, 2) tags, and 3) blog directory.
- Technorati provides tools that allow you to keep on top of blog posts for specific subjects (like your company).
Follow these steps to marketing your business through a blog:
Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done
Search for your company on Technorati
There may be hundreds of blogs that already contain some reference to your company. Finding these posts and reading them can give you a rare look into your customers’ minds.
I recommend: Do a search for your company on
Technorati’s main page. Enter your company to find all the blogs that have mentioned your company in the past.
Use Technorati's advanced search tools
Technorati allows you to search "in tags" instead of the default "in blog posts." This narrows the results of a search to posts that have been labeled by the writer with this tag. This human element of indexing makes these search results especially accurate. The third type of search, "in blog directory," will only pull up your company's blog, or someone else's blog that writes exclusively about your company.
I recommend: Do the same search as above, but choose “in tags” from the drop down box to the right of the search term. Alternately, visit the
Technorati tag search page.
Use a watchlist to keep an eye on this search in the future
Technorati allows you to save your searches as “watchlists.” Watchlists may be viewed in RSS format which means they may be imported into an RSS reader to make it very easy to keep track of who is writing about your company.
I recommend: To create a saved search in a watchlist, visit Technorati’s watchlist page and type in a search term. (NOTE: you must be registered with and logged in to Technorati to use this feature. Registration is free.) Once the search is saved, choose “View in RSS format” from the bottom of the search results. This opens a page containing the RSS feed. The URL of this page may be loaded into an RSS reader that allows quick access to the results of this page. For a comparison of RSS readers, visit
The RSS Blog.
Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide
- When searching for your company, place your company name in quotes. If I searched for Pajama Market (my company), every blog that mentioned those two words anywhere in a post would come up. But, if I searched for "Pajama Market" only blogs that put those terms next to each other will show up. It looks for the exact phrase when in quotes.
- When you find a blog that mentions your company, leave a comment on their blog. This lets them know that you take interest in them writing about you. If the post was negative, it also shows that real people from your company are reading what they've written, and are savvy enough to respond to it. Bloggers are almost always more cordial and less likely to be critical if they know they are being read by the person they are criticizing.
- When someone writes something negative about you, read all the comments before responding. You may find that a fan of your company has already defended you nicely and an "official" response may not be necessary. This happens more often than not.
- Use the advanced search options to find posts that link to your website's or blog's URL. Sometimes a blog will link to your website, but will call the link something else, something a standard search will miss. Searching for your URL will find these posts.
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