In a media climate in which anyone can publish material about anything they like, anytime they wish, it is crucial for marketers to keep a close eye on what others are saying about their brands.

To simplify the process of scanning thousands of blogs, review sites, "tweets," forums and social networks, Search Engine Journal's Ann Smarty recommends Feed Killer, a simple tool that lets users track their brand, name or keywords from a single feed.

The tool is free and requires no registration. You can incorporate as many feeds as you wish, and decide how many stories you want to see from each source.

As an example, Smarty demonstrates how to build a unified feed for tracking a name across both Twitter and the blogosphere. The example used here is for MarketingVOX:

• Create a title for your feed
• Query [MarketingVOX] on Twitter search, copy the RSS feed link and paste it into FeedKiller
• Query [MarketingVOX] on Google blog search, copy the RSS feed link and paste it into FeedKiller
• Hit "build it!"

FeedKiller creates a single feed that consistently aggregates data about MarketingVOX from the resources above. To add more resources, like forum or review searches, follow the process shown above for Twitter and Google blog search on the relevant sites.

In the realm of reputation management, SEO has also demonstrated itself to be a useful ally.