Effective listening online is about making use of the world of information available to us for personal and company development. We can learn from experts across the world who will tell us about their experience, industry best practice, tools, tips and techniques irrespective of the business you’re in and it’s free.

Yes, we have all heard the saying “we were given two ears but only one mouth for a reason” and with the billions of conversations talking place online today, there is plenty to listen to.

A lot of these conversations provide us with information we could use to improve our business but how do you keep up.

There are a number of great free tools online for filtering information by topic, key word or phrase, brand and competitor.  Here are 2 I have been using for years and they have literally increased my bottom line. You will need a Google account to set up both these services –the great thing is that this is free.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts will notify you via email when a topic you specify is mentioned online. For example I have an alerts set up for clients and their competitors in addition to topics of interest such as “Social Media”.  Then once a day (or once a week if you prefer) I receive an email with links to websites where the topic is mentioned. To start today, simply go to http://www.google.com/alerts and enter the words you want to be alerted about. This short video will also explain how it works http://bit.ly/GoogleAlertsVideo

Google Reader

Google Reader allows you to subscribe to your favourite websites and blogs in one place. In fact, you don’t even have to visit the actual the website to see the updates. How? Well most websites these days have an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feed. Blogs have RSS by default. When you go to your favourite website or blog, look for the words ‘RSS Feed’ or the orange RSS icon. Cliick on this icon and it will add it to your Google Reader account.

Over time you will build up a nice list of informative sites and Google Reader will even let you know if the website/blog has been updated since the last time you looked at Reader. There will also be a number in brackets beside the website title denoting how many updates (if any) have been made. Reader will also allow you to add a Twitter Account you want to follow without actually ‘Following’ e.g a competitor. You can also monitor Facebook Company Pages without clicking on ‘Like’.

To set up you free account visit http://www.google.ie/reader/

There is also a useful video at http://bit.ly/GoogleReaderVideo