| TECHNOLOGY & YOUR AGENCY |
Google Alerts - Your Personal Virtual Research Assistant
BY Steve Anderson
I am surprised at how little agency staff — especially producers — use Google Alerts .
Using Google Alerts is like having a personal virtual research assistant spending 100 % of their time searching the web to find news , comments , and articles based on keywords and phrases you select . The advantage to this personal assistant is it doesn ’ t get tired and it doesn ’ t forget to do a search !
And this service will not cost you anything because it is provided for free by the world ’ s most popular search engine — Google .
I use Google Alerts constantly to automatically scour the web looking for information that ’ s of interest to me . As you can see in the screenshot below , I have a large number of search phrases . Google Alerts constantly monitors the web for new instances of my search terms . It then sends me a daily email recap of the most important items for my review .
Setting up and using Google Alerts is easy .
• Just log into your Google Account and select “ Alerts ” from the list of Google products available . Alternatively , you can go to http :// www . google . com / alerts
• Create a new Alert by typing in the search terms and / or phrases that you want it to find .
• The full power of Google ’ s search options is available to you in Alerts . Be sure to review all the search options to narrow your search to just the information you are interested in receiving .
• You do have the option of choosing the frequency ( weekly or daily ) of emails you receive with the search results . All of my Alert results emails are sent to me daily .
• Google Alerts remembers which links were previously sent . This means that once you see an item listed in an email , you will not see it again unless the information has changed within that particular article or web page . Be aware , the email alerts for the first few days will likely contain a lot of hits .
There are a number of uses for Google Alerts within an insurance agency . Here are a few suggestions :
• Create an Alert with your agency name ( s ). This allows you to find out when your agency is mentioned online and can help you protect your agency brand . This can be especially important when any negative comments might appear .
• Create an Alert with the names of individuals and / or companies that are your current clients . This allows you to
4 KANSAS INSURANCE AGENT & BROKER | MAY - JUNE 2016 |