Digg and other social news sites are very popular web services that are used by millions of people. People submit stories and they are voted on by other members, they can also make comments on these stories. Unfortunately if your company is in the public eye some of these stories can be bad PR for your company or even your company leadership. You may even have an internal leak posting stories about your company. So, how do you track down the source of these PR nightmares or determine what employees might be disparaging your company? Short of hiring a computer forensics expert there are some simple ways to track stories about your company

Determining the Suspects:
This will take a bit of investigating and you may have to get IT involved. First you may have no way of knowing a persons username on certain sites, other times it is pretty obvious. If there are things that are being leaked onto these sites and only certain employees have access to this information then you may be halfway home. You can also use clues to help. Let’s say your company is going through some financial troubles. You have an accountant that just loves to brag about his waterskiing exploits. The next day you find an article posted to Digg about your companies troubles by a username of ski-boy. Now this in and of itself may not mean anything but if you dig deeper using some of the methods below you can form a pretty good picture of the situation. Another way of determining someone’s username is very simple; some people just use their name or variations thereof. IT may also be able to help determine who your target is by checking their user logs. Next we get into monitoring your online reputation.

Software:
There are extremes that you can go to, like installing a product called Activity Monitor. There are legal obligations to installing this type of software so please consult with your attorney first.

Computer Logs:
Your IT department should be able to tell you what websites are being visited by your employees. Obviously this would only work while your employees are logged in to the network from work or VPN.

Simple Internet Searches:
You can search for your company name using Google or a similar search engine and see if there are any negative articles or posts. To get more specific, let’s say you want to search Digg for articles on your company, using the Google search box type in “your company site:digg.com” replacing “your company” with your actual company’s name. You can then find any references to your company and check out the results. You can also do the same thing using a username. If you suspect a certain employee of spreading false rumors about your company or executives and you happen to know their screen name on Digg or for that matter another site you can type into the Google search box “username site:digg.com”. This will give a pretty comprehensive list of the stories that were submitted and the stories Dugg by that individual. You may also want to use this method on prospective employees as well.

More Advanced Searches:
You can conduct more advanced searches using Google by going to the advanced search function on Google You can search by exact phrase, search for exact file types, search within a specific domain like shown above and much more. This would be a good opportunity to search for documents and other proprietary material used by your company.

Google Alerts:
These are really handy! Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and just sign up for an alert that includes your company name. You may want to have several alerts setup to include your url and keywords as well.

These are just a few ways to maintain or monitor your online reputation. We are in no way advocating violating your employees’ right to privacy, but if you find yourself in a position of having to defend yourself against false rumors or bad PR then take action. There are many of these social sites like Digg so do your research and check as many as you can. You can find a pretty comprehensive list here.

Tags: company, company name, digg, employees, google, google search, online reputation, search, stories, using gogole