By Jill Duffy Negative user feedback about Google Alerts, one of the most popular search and notification services online, exploded earlier this year. A few months ago, Google Alerts users started reporting that the service was slow to find new instances of search terms online, or that it missed them entirely—and it hasn't improved. In my hunt for an alternative to Google Alerts, I landed on Mention (free to $64.99 per user per month for the Enterprise edition) and was impressed at how much more it does than Google Alerts.Mention actively searches the Web and social media sites for key terms of your choosing, with advanced search criteria available, and in multiple languages. When a new mention of your key terms is found, you can use Mention to assign follow-up to that activity (if you're working in a collaborative environment), or track the sentiment by marking it positive, negative, or neutral. Mention is much richer than Google Alerts, and way better than the rudimentary SocialMention Web app. There's a lot to uncover in this wonderful program, whether you use it locally on your desktop, in a mobile app, or elsewhere.
Compatibility and Availability
Mention is available both online as a Web app at Mention.net, as well as locally on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and as a plug-in for Chrome. This review looks at the Windows version.
All the apps are free to download, but you'll need a Mention account to use them, which come in free and paid varieties (more on that below).
Basic Features
Like Google Alerts, Mention lets you set up alerts for key terms, and then the program actively scours the Internet day and night until it finds new mentions of those terms. When a new one is found, Mention lets you know. You can get pop-up alerts right on your screen, view them in the program itself, and receive notifications via email. The mobile apps have push notifications as well.
The advanced search features are thorough. You can add operators (AND, OR, and the like), include different languages, and include or exclude various kinds of websites. For example, you could search only the Web and social media sites, but not video sites. You can also block URLs, which is handy if you're aware of a high volume of Web content being published on your own sites for which you don't require notifications.
You can also turn on or off a "noise" filter, which will show you only highly relevant results of importance. I wish there were more documentation or even a few tips upfront about how the noise filter works, as I found it a little confusing. On Mention.net's FAQ page, I found more information: "When you trash a mention, our anti-noise technology will automatically trash the mentions that are related to the one you've trashed. To get more results, you should untrash the mentions that are relevant to your search." I like that this feature and technology exists, but I do wish I had known sooner how to use it properly.
In addition to monitoring instances of your key terms being talked about online, you can also directly hook up Twitter and Facebook accounts to Mention and monitor their activity in the same place. This section isn't as robust as, say, TweetDeck or HootSuite, which both has scheduling tools for sending posts at different times of day, and other social media-specific features.
An invaluable feature for teams using Mention in a business setting is tasks. If more than one person has access to a Mention account, they can assign one another tasks such as following up on online mentions. For example, if someone tweets at my Twitter account, I could assign a different team member to reply or privately message that user. Or if you spotted a mention online that did not look legitimate, you could assign someone from the licensing department to chase after the content creator.
More Features
Start exploring Mention, and you'll uncover some really rich features. Some are simple, like the ability to generate RSS feed URLs for your alerts, while others are much more complex and well suited for business environments. Statistics, for example, let you run reports of mentions and export that data for other uses. Mention also has some element of sentiment tracking, although a few "beta" flags let me know that these features are still in development. When a new mention comes into your account, the service might mark it as positive, negative, or neutral. And, in fact, you can mark the sentiment yourself if you prefer, likely with more accurate results.
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