Last week, we discussed the importance of managing your brand reputation online, and some effective ways to intercept negative comments or posts about you and your practice.

As more and more patients turn to the Internet to share their experience about their office visit, procedure or treatment, it’s imperative that you have a brand reputation monitoring strategy in place so that you can protect your brand identity and address concerns as quickly as possible.

In addition to using free tools such as Google Alerts, BackType and BoardTrackers.com, there are a few other great tools that will help you better monitor your practice’s brand reputation online.

Technorati is a blog search engine that indexes thousands of blog posts every hour. You can sign up for an account with Technorati and link to your blog or website so that it can be ranked based on authority and popularity.

If you’re using Twitter on a regular basis, you can monitor the popularity of certain keywords in your industry, and also track links that people are retweeting using free services such as TweetBeep or Monitter.

Another simple way to manage your brand on Twitter is to simply run a basic Twitter search on your practice name or primary doctor names.

When you’re fairly active with posting blog comments, participating in social media sites such as Digg Twitter and other microblogging tools,  you may benefit from running a search on sites such as Social Mention. This social media search engine provides search results only of blogs and social media tools, giving you an ‘at a glance’ view of any mentions of your practice and doctor names in real time.

Monitoring the effects of your social media activities and keeping up with comments and reviews about your practice is easier when you have an arsenal of tools by your side. Consider using some of these tools as part of your brand reputation monitoring strategy.