So you want to know what your competition is up to? You want to know what people are saying about your company? Well, on the web that’s easy enough to take care of. Simply go to Google Alerts, and set up some alerts. You can enter any text to search for, and when Google encounters it, it’ll send you an email (you can set up the frequency of the emails to ‘as it happens’, daily, or ‘once a week’). How well does it work? Well, I have the name of my company in an alert, and last Tuesday afternoon I got an email informing me that someone had written a blog post about a presentation that my CEO had given that morning… There are no restrictions on the text that you can enter, so feel free to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to, but also be mindful that entering text that’s too broad can result in a large number of emails.