As part of your marketing strategy, you may already have set up Google alerts on your business name (or your own) to find out what is being said about your business. But have you thought about trying this as part of your risk awareness process?
Not using Google Alerts yet? It’s easy to set up. Visit Google Alerts, and tell Google what you’d like to be notified about, how often, the part of the world you are interested in, and so on. You will need to provide an email address for the notifications to be sent to, but you can see a few results without sharing an email address if you prefer.
Usually people set up alerts on their brand name, product names and their competitors (or themselves) to learn something about what people are saying about them, but you can get more specific using +/- signs. For example, you could try:
- “your brand name” + intitle:review
- “your brand name” + “bad value” [you can use any terms: hate / don’t buy / scam / recommend … ]
- “your brand name” + “competitor brand name”
There are, of course, lots of media monitoring tools out there—and Google Alerts isn’t perfect—but as a free option, it is a good place to start.
So what about risk awareness alerting?
It’s important to understand what risks might be facing your business. Google won’t know specifics about your setup, so can’t tell you whether you are facing an insider threat—and if you live in a flood zone, you probably need real-time alerting. But you could set up alerts such as:
- ‘your industry’ + risks
- ‘your industry’ + cyberattack
- ‘your industry’ + data breach
- ‘your industry’ + cybersecurity’
- ‘your industry’ + fraud
- ‘your competitor name’ + ‘new product’
- ‘your location’ + ‘weather warning’
… you get the idea. Consider choosing ‘news’ as the source, if you’re interested in breaking news, or ‘blogs’ if you’re more interested in discussion. You can always edit the alert to refine it or reduce the frequency of alerting. Google will send you emails if something new crops up using the keywords you’ve chosen.
The more information you have about potential risks to your business, the better placed you are to work out what you might do about them. Need some support in managing information security risk in your business? Contact the Click and Protect team on 0113 733 6230, or use our contact form.
