Using Yahoo Pipes in your Online Reputation Management

Posted by: Thomas Rowley

Keeping track of your online reputation is time consuming enough without having to decide which of the myriad tools you use to get the job done.

However, whichever combination you decide on, whether Google Alerts, Google News Feeds, IceRocket Search Feeds, Technorati Watchlists, etc, make sure you aggregate them through Yahoo Pipes, an essential tool for today’s communications professional.

Yahoo Pipes helps you keep track of your Online Reputation without having to search in 20 different places. You can aggregate content feeds from a number of different sources, and present them in RSS, email or even SMS, without needing the skillset of a programmer.

Here is a Yahoo Pipe I created from an existing News Aggregator Pipe (Yahoo Pipes allows you to easily ?clone? existing pipes & modify them.)

How to use this Pipe:

1. Enter your search term in the search box and click ?Run Pipe?, which will return a list of results.

2. You can then subscribe to the updates through RSS, etc.

As with any Online Reputation Management tool there is a certain amount of manual reading involved to determine which results are relevant. But Yahoo Pipes certainly goes a long way toward simplifying the task in hand.