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What Google Alerts Can't Do

Over the past few months we’ve done many focus groups with internet marketing professionals, website owners, and brand managers to gather feedback on AirCheese to help us make it the best social media monitoring product on the internet.  For the most part, we’ve been extremely encouraged by the feedback and the extent to which our list of BETA tester applicants is far exceeding our capacity.  If you are not already on it, beware that we will be closing down the opportunity to sign up very soon.  Even if you don’t get selected, we will be allowing all applicants to get a heavy discount on the service once launched. 

One thing that we are hearing over and over is that people are using Google Alerts to stay on top of their site and competition.  Much to the chagrin of Google enthusiasts (of which I’m one), GA is simply ineffective when trying to realistically monitor social media networks.  And there are reasons that go far beyond just touting how comprehensive AirCheese is.  Let me explain:

Limited Coverage

One of the biggest things that google lacks is coverage.  Yes, indeed they are the search goliaths, email aficionados, and now mobile platform pioneers, but that doesn’t mean that they own the internet.  Google Alerts has the power to monitor, well, Google.  This excludes some of the most critical information on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Technorati, and the thousands of sites that are beyond Google’s “reach.”
In statistics, the relevancy of your results of your confidence level, is based on your sample size (n).  Drawing conclusions from Google Analytics, though tempting could be inherently flawed because they are not in fact looking at the whole picture.  Your sample size sucks because you don’t have the ability to look at the whole internet.

Timing is Everything

In the time it takes GA to get you a message that your keyphrase has been mentioned on a website, you could have been assassinated on the social sites a million times over.  Yes, Google is impressively quick, but given the choice between a Camero and a Ferrari, which are you picking for a race?  Leaving the ability to monitor social media, combined with the inability to get intelligent results fast is what separates a tool from a novelty.

Results, Results, Results

GA, is like a clipping service, scouring their network to give you links to things that might be worthwhile for you to read.  It is then your job to click each one, read them, catalogue them, and find out if they are important and/or relevant.  That’s great if you have a low traffic site, or have a lot of time on your hands, but if you are receiving more than a handful of mentions in a day, you could spend the whole day just clicking on each one. 
AirCheese, actually reviews each mention and uses proprietary screen reading technology to give an assessment of how the mention will do for you.  It then scores each one, so you can see visually and numerically how you are doing at all times.  GA is the RAW data, AirCheese is the processed data and the facts.

Wrap Up

There are plenty of other alerting services, some of which are free, some of which are paid, that allow you to harvest links and jam your inbox with “alerts.”  The critical component of AirCheese is that it is trying to eliminate the need to review (or at least review as much) in hopes of saving you time and giving you more actionable information.