How to Monitor Sidewiki | Social Media Strategies

Google Sidewiki – How to Know if You’re Being Talked About

Good morning. This will be a quick update post today. So, I have been doing some research to see if you can easily monitor what people are saying in Sidewiki. I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far.

Your first option and the most comprehensive is to download the Google Toolbar. After it’s installed, go to your website and you can see right away (the Sidewiki icon turns yellow when there’s an entry) if anyone is talking about you. Of course, they could be making comments on any of the pages of your site so you’d have to search the whole site each day. I’ll update you when something more sophisticated is available.

The second option is to go to google.com and search the following:
site:google.com/sidewiki/entry/ examplecompanyname

Now, I did this and for mainstream sites like Microsoft and Walmart, you get results. For smaller sites, even when they have a Sidewiki entry, you do not seem to get results. I did not get any results for my site even though there is a Sidewiki entry on it. I will investigate this further and get back to you.

Why should you care about Sidewiki? The answer is that people may be posting derogatory comments about you or your products in the Sidewiki adjacent to your website. When visitors see the yellow Sidewiki icon, they’ll look. This could help you lose business. You can report spam and abuse to Google but you have no way of removing these comments on your own.

Look on the bright side; this is the one time that having a low traffic site might be an advantage. There just aren’t enough tech-savvy people visiting your site and posting comments. Tomorrow I’ll give more details about claiming your site on Google and getting your comments in first.

Thanks for reading. Please comment if you have anything to say or if you have information to share on monitoring Google Sidewiki.