The easiest way to monitor your hunting brand is to sign up for Google Alerts.  Google Alerts is a free service and all that is required is your email address.  Google Alerts crawls the entire web and notifies you when your term has been mentioned.  This allows you quickly to view the website your term is appearing and to take action on if needed.  Not only can you set up search terms that contain you company name, your product names, your name, but it might also be a good idea to set up alerts on your competitors.  This will keep you fully up-to-date with your brand and your competition.  Follow these easy steps and you will be monitoring your business on the web in a few minutes.

1. Visit Google Alerts.
2. Enter the search terms for you to be alerted on.
3. Select the type.  My recommendation is to select ‘All’.
4. Select how often you would like to be alerted.  I prefer to be alerted as it happens.
5. Select how many results.  Pick 50 to be safe.
6. Then provide your email address.

To manage Google Alerts, you will need to have profile on Google.  Again, free to sign up.  Here you can modify your settings to be email alerts of to read them in a feed (ie Google Reader).  As hunting business owner or a hunting marketing official, you need to be aware of what is being said and to remedy the situation if it calls for it.  This free service makes it very simple to do that.

For those of you that don’t know, Google is about to revolutionize the way we collaborate with co-workers, friends, and family.  Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

There are very limited amount of invites that are being issued by Google.  I was lucky enough to receive my invite in the mail yesterday and will be awarding two invites to two lucky people.  The first will be a random drawing from the people that follow me on Twitter.  I will draw 1 lucky winner from my followers.  If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you can follow me @FieldTweets.

For the second drawing, you must comment on this post with “Why you deserve a Google Wave invite?”  I will go through all comments and select the best response, be creative as possible.  The drawing will be in a few days.