Have you ever ego surfed? Do you manage a few blog sites? Do you have a brand image to maintain? Do you have any idea what the web-o-sphere is talking about the new Facebook application you created for your client? Are you working on an online reputation management project for some brand and weekly progress needs to be sent to your client by your team? Google Docs Spreadsheets does the job easy for you, combined with Google’s famed search engine and Yahoo Pipes!

Reputation is different from image or branding for the fact that the earlier can be created and the former is an identity that evolves, are a pointer to where an organization is now and where it intend to be and not necessarily where it is coming from and how to get to a new state that is healthier. Reputation management is neither public relation nor data collecting or advertisement management, it deals with the root cause of a problem, offers solutions, set processes in motion and monitors progress towards these solutions. For the effective management a matrix was developed to that effect in-house in our organization, R.I.P.E matrix as its called stand for Repair, Improve, Polish or Eliminate, but what are really the different stages of reputation (Quoted off Wikipedia).

Companies that want to protect their brand visibility on the web would do well to make optimizing their brand content a best practice. Optimizing all digital communications including: PR, marketing, SEO, HR, investor relations and related electronic content that is publicly available on the web as well as social media: text, images, audio, video will produce more branded content in the SERPs. Doing so doesn’t necessarily put the brand in control, but it’s a much better situation than scrambling after the fact.

So, how do we go about with the problem?

1.       First, let us decide which search engines shall we use to monitor what the web is talking about our brand in question, iPhone.

2.       We finalize on Google News and Google Blog Search (yup, you can call me a Google Fanboy).

3.       On Google News, search for iPhone and copy the RSS URL from the results page.
 

4.       Search for the term iPhone on Google Blog Search too and again copy the RSS URL from the results page.

5.       Now, combine the two RSS feeds on Yahoo Pipes and copy the new URL.

6.       Now, shoot up Google Docs and create a new Spreadsheet.
 

7.       Type =importfeed(”rss-url”,,true) on the very first cell of the spreadsheet, with the URL you picked up from Yahoo Pipes to replace “rss-url”.

8.       The moment you hit the Enter button, a pretty large table gets created with every row populated by the stories on iPhone.

9.       This table can further be customized to suit your needs and can also be shared and collaborated with multiple people across the globe.

10.   The data is dynamic and gets updated with latest stories and links to them, automatically.

This is the power of Google Docs for you. A lot many people keep questioning the use of online collaboration tools and their effectiveness over traditional desktop clients. Here we come up with a little experiment that demonstrates the sheer power of such online word processing suites.

By the way, just in case you are curious about other Google Docs commands and wish to suggest interesting ways of using them, you can check them out at Google Doc’s official help page.

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