Posts tagged Alerts
Amber Alerts Come to Facebook
Jan 14th
Social media presents both challenges and opportunity for those concerned with getting the word out about disasters and crime. The Emergency Broadcast System, for instance, has recently made the leap into mobile. Now, the latest innovation in crisis communications is the sharing of Amber Alerts on Facebook.
Amber Alert is an international system to broadcast child abduction notices via television, radio, email, mobile and other media. Extending it to the most popular social network in the world makes sense.
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To get Amber Alerts via Facebook, go to the Amber Alert Facebook page and “like” the Alert for your state. It is also available for Puerto Rico, D.C. and the Virgin Islands, as well as the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Ontario and Newfoundland.
Information in an Amber Alert includes descriptions of the victim and, if available, the abductor, description and license plate of vehicle involved, and time and place of abduction.
The penetration of Facebook well past early and even secondary adopters, to your parents and grandparents, make it a powerful tool for such outreach. Almost 28,000 people like the main page but only about 1,500 like the Oregon Amber Alert page, as an example. So it needs to build some to become truly effective.
Amber Alert is named after Amber Hagerman, a Texas girl whose abduction and murder remain unsolved.
Additional sources: Lost Remote
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Emergency Broadcast System Alerts, Coming Soon to Your Cellphone
Nov 17th
The Emergency Broadcast System was for decades the way in which we were notified of emergencies via the television and radio. (Or more likely, the way in which we were notified of a “test of the Emergency Broadcast System.”) But undoubtedly we are turning to other real-time technologies to inform us when there are national, state, and local crises.
The Urgent Communications Journal reported today that Alcatel-Lucent has made commercially available its broadcast message center that’s designed to help bring these alerts to people’s cellphones in order to comply with Federal Communication Commission’s Commercial Mobile Alert System.
Sponsor
With this new system, service providers will be able to send targeted government agency texts to alert mobile users in a specific area. While everyone will have to receive presidential alerts (something that’s never been issued in the almost 50 years of the program’s existence), people will be able to opt out of messages about imminent threats and Amber alerts.
“With the public increasingly relying on cell phones, it becomes mission critical for service providers to be able to share critical, time-sensitive information over these devices during times of crisis,” Alcatel-Lucent’s vice president Morgan Wright told MSNBC.
The program is being tested in California and Florida and should be ready in time to comply with the new FCC guidelines by April 2012.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Suggestions Get Localized For Countries Around The World, News Alerts Improved
Oct 25th
The Google Blog announced a few new features for Google search this week. First, they confirmed the realtime counter we reported earlier last week. Second, local search suggestions are now for cities around the world, not just in the US. Finally, Google Alerts for news based alerts is now improved.
In April 2010, Google [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google Localized Autocomplete Now International & News Alerts Improved
Oct 25th
The Google Blog announced a few new features for Google search this week. First, they confirmed the realtime counter we reported earlier last week. Second, the autocomplete suggestions are now localized internationally. Finally, Google Alerts for news based alerts is now improved.
In April 2010, Google made search suggestions, now called autocomplete locally [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google Translate Adds Latin, Google Renews Flu Search, & Adds Languages To Video Alerts
Oct 11th
Google announced a few new small features added recently.
(1) Google Translate added Latin as a new language. Google said, “although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues.” I am sure those who study in this [...]
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Yahoo Answers Gets Major Search Upgrades, Email Alerts
Jul 16th
Yahoo Answers, the number one Answers/Q&A search engine on the web, has announced a series of improvements to the search experience on the site. The new search options are a welcome addition to what was long one of the site’s Achilles heels. Here’s an overview of some the new tools:
Search results can now be sorted [...]
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Google Alerts Drops Web Filter & Improves Quality
Jun 10th
It seems like the Google Alerts team is up to some new tricks. A couple weeks ago, Google tweaked the quality algorithm of Google Alerts and, although I missed it then TechCrunch noticed, they dropped the web alerts option.
In regards to the quality change, Googler Marcel said:
Regarding the volume of alerts, we’ve been tweaking [...]
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How To Use Google Alerts For Quick and Easy Domain Alerts
Jun 2nd
Posted by atlasws
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
There’s no shortage of posts and tutorials built around setting up a monitoring dashboard. Everyone has a favorite. Mine is from Marty Wientraub from Aim Clear (see How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard). There are new services that spring up every few months about monitoring like Scout Labs and Trackur, a lot of which are very good products. However in some cases those products are like driving a Ferrari to the supermarket to pick up a quart of milk: it’s just overkill and too much power for the job. Sometimes you just need a quick, easy solution for the task at hand. Here’s how I do it.
If you’re an account manager for a large firm, or "the guy" in a one man operation, you should always be on the lookout for tools that you can use to automate the low level and receptive work. Google Alerts is one of those tools. There are some smart ways you can get Google Alerts to work for you.
When you set up Google Alerts, if you choose the "email" delivery option and choose "once a day," you should know that the first alert will come about 24 hours later. It will repeat every day at about the same time. So if you want your alerts to come at 9 am every morning, set them up just before 9 am and you’re all set. The one problem with this is that, if you adjust an alert, the time resets to the last time you adjusted it. It would be nice if Google gave us the ability to specify a delivery time, but that’s not the case. If you choose "as it happens," you’ll get email alerts at random times during the day. There are some cases where you want this, and we’ll get into that below, but in most cases I recommend once per day.
The second thing you need to know is that Google recently changed the filtering methodology in an attempt to show/send fewer alerts. When you set up an alert, you can specify the maximum number of results, either 20 or 50. This setting also seems to correspond to how sensitive the filter is. Set it to 50 and you’ll get deeper, less trusted sites showing up; set it to 20 and the results will show only the more trusted results. The truth is you need both (again, we’ll get into that below). It would be nice if Google gave us the option to choose trusted/all results independent of the number, but that’s not the case.
Lastly I recommend setting up an alias email address specifically for Google Alerts. When you go on vacation or will be out of the office for a few days, you don’t want the emails piling up in your inbox. You might want them to forward to someone else or temporarily get deleted. In a perfect world you would have two aliases: one for the priority alerts, another for the standard ones. Again, more on that below.
Ok let’s get down to business. The following tactic is built upon one that was first talked about by Patrick Aloft a few years ago (see How to Use Google Alerts to Find Out if Your Site Gets Hacked). What we are trying to do is trap for certain conditions that we need to know about. I divide my alerts into two blocks: things I need to know about as soon as possible and things that I need to know about that aren’t time sensitive. These are the three Google Alerts I set up for every site I run and every client site I work on.
viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:wolf-howl.com
poker OR casino OR hold-em OR holdem site:wolf-howl.com
nude OR naked OR sex OR porn site:wolf-howl.com
When I set up these alerts I want to know ASAP when it happens, because it means someone has hacked the server, or some content was published or approved that probably shouldn’t have been. I also want all the results, whether trusted or not. I can deal with a few false positives, but not getting an alert I wanted would be bad. Recently, Rand linked to a post by Richard Baxter showing that spam keywords that were nofollowed in the comment section had an effect on rankings, so you want to watch out for this stuff. I split/grouped the terms to make it easy to maintain. You could use one big long query joined with "OR" statements, but you run the risk of things "breaking" much more easily. As a result, I like to keep it manageable and under 4 or 5 terms.
The next set of terms I set up only come once a day and don’t have to be as extensive, so I limit it to 20 results. Here are the terms I use:
wolf-howl.com {site:facebook.com OR site:digg.com OR site:delicious.com OR site:stumbleupon.com OR site:mixx.com OR site:reddit.com}
site: wolf-howl.com
wolf-howl.com site:twitter.com
Depending on the total number of alerts you’re getting, you can bulk them all together. Adjusting the setup times or getting the alerts in batches throughout the day is up to you.
One last tip. In addition to using the "OR" phrase as in the examples above, you can also use negative phrases. Here’s an example of one that that I use for a vanity search for my name:
"michael gray" -dj -uk -football -police
There is a famous DJ who share my name and -dj eliminates most of his results. There is a UK soccer/football player who shares my name as well. Since I have a fairly common name it’s becoming more frequent that Google comes across arrest records from newspapers with people who share my name; the "-police" takes care of most of that. The way I figure, if I did get arrested, hopefully I’d know about it before Google does. 
Michael Gray has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing. He has helped companies with internal search engine optimization strategies for both ecommerce and informational websites. He publishes controversial industry thoughts and observations on his blog at www.wolf-howl.com.
View full post on SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
Filter Google Alerts with Alerts Grader
May 31st
I’ve been using Google Alerts for tracking my brand name(s) and important keyword mentions for ages. It has never been perfect and I am using it in combination with other tools that either add something or filter the results.
I have already mentioned one tool that helps to make sense of your Google alerts. Today I am sharing an additional one (yes, an additional one because I currently use both to emphasize on most important updates without missing others as well).
Alerts Grader is a new tool that helps you filter Google Alerts and Twitter Following notifications: for you not to miss most important news.
Configure and Use the Tool
Instantly after creating an account there, you will be given your Alerts Grader email address where you can forward all the notifications.
To let the service grade your Google Alerts, you will have to create an email filter – I am using Gmail, so I have created a filter to forward all the mail from:
googlealerts-noreply@google.com OR googlealerts-noreply@alerts.grader.com
to get forwarded to my Alerts Grader email account (to be graded there):
Note that I have kept “Skip the Inbox” option unchecked to receive “regular” alerts from Google as well:
Now just go to “Settings” page and set the minimum “grade” of the websites in your Google Alerts (all sites below that grade will be filtered out). The tool uses its Website Grader tool to grade the websites – which is not precise but you will find it quite usable:
You can also enable (or disable) either an immediate alert or a daily digest.
So now you will receive additional email alerts of most powerful websites mentioning your brand name:
Besides that you can access a web digest of all alerts, organize them by tags and see the grade of each one:
I am not a long-time user of the tool but I feel like I am going to stick to it, so you may want to give it a try as well!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Filter Google Alerts with Alerts Grader
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