Everything Digital

Few weeks ago, Seth Godin, the famous internet marketing guru, posted something about protecting your brilliant ideas in this digital age. His advise? Don’t protect them! Instead of wasting your time and money chasing after people who “pirated” your ideas, build  a platform for commerce instead. Make money out of it and let those ideas spread.

But if you really must be paranoid about the content you wrote in your website, there are some ways you can track those who copied your materials. First I suggest you check Copyscape. Copyscape is a script that analyzes your site content and searches the entire web looking for duplicate copies of your original material. All you need to do is type your domain name in the Copyscape website and hit the Go button. In a matter of seconds, you will see all the sites that contain copies of your material. You even get to see the exact word count if you follow the link.

Another way to keep track of your brand is to use SocialOomph. Although this service is intended for other purposes (delayed posting for Twitter and WordPress), I found out that it can also be used to “listen” to the conversations on Twitter. You can use it to tell you whenever you or your brand is mentioned in the Tweets. This doesn’t work like Copyscape but in a way, it could be a great tool to keep track of what people are saying about you.

I was able to use this function more than a month ago when a guy from London accused me of hacking his website. He sent me an email about it and we were able to fix the problem (turned out that we were both hacked) but I didn’t know that he tweeted it many times to his followers. By using SocialOomph, I learned of his tweets against me and I asked him to delete them. He graciously agreed.

The third way to protect your personal brand on the internet is to use Google alerts. This is far more advanced than SocialOomph as it scours the entire web, not just Twitter. You can set the keywords that you would like to monitor and Google will email you whenever you are mentioned anywhere.