Keeping Up with Valley Part I: Google Alerts | by Kelly Cox

 If you’re reading this blog, we know that you are a Valley_® enthusiast! If not…well, we can change that around pretty fast. And, if you want to be, but don’t know where to start, we can help with that, too!

This blog post is the first in a how-to-find-Valley-in-the-digital-world-and-beyond series. In this post, I’ll walk you through one great way to get instant updates on Valley Irrigation and the Valley brand.

Subscribing to a FREE Google Alert about Valley will send the latest news about the company and brand to your email inbox. Setting up a Google Alert is easy – just follow these steps:

1. From your favorite web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer…Opera…), navigate to www.google.com/alert. You’ll then see a box that looks like this:

2. In the box that says “Search Query,” type in “Valley Irrigation.” (without the period after the word “Irrigation”)

3. From there, choose the Result Type you would like to receive in your email inbox. Choose:

• “Everything” to get alerts of every kind of media published online about Valley.
• “News” to just receive press release and news article alerts.
• “Blogs” if you would like to receive alerts when a new “Growing the Conversation” blog post is published, or even when Valley is mentioned in some other blog!
• “Video” to receive alerts of a newly published Valley video on YouTube.
• “Discussions” to keep up-to-date with forum threads that are either about or mention Valley.
• “Books” when a new e-book is published about Valley…I recommend you don’t just choose this one - alerts will be seldom, at best.

4. Next, choose how often you would like to receive emails from our friend Google: as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week. I prefer the “once a day” setting, as I A) don’t want to be bombarded with emails and B) want to know the day of when something new is published and available for my perusal.

5. The last setting for you to choose is “How many,” which is asking you “What quality of results do you want us to send ya?” You have two settings from which to choose: receive “Only the best results” or receive “All results.” The “All results” setting is a bit subjective; as a marketing professional and overall digital media geek, I want to see anything that could be about our company and brand, even if it ends up being completely irrelevant (that’s what the Delete button was invented for). However, you may want to try your hand at the “Only the best results setting;” however, keep in mind that the “Only the best results” setting is probably being filtered by robots and not by a real human, so you may miss out on some of the Valley awesomeness.

6. Last but not least, enter your email address, so Google knows where to send your Valley alerts!

7. I lied in No. 6…the very last thing you need to do is hit the “CREATE ALERT” button. You can’t miss it.

So, a finished Google Alert, with the settings described above, should look like this:

In the “Search Query” field, you don’t just have to type in “Valley Irrigation” to get results from Valley. Other options include:

• Valley
• Irrigation
• Valmont Irrigation
• Valmont Industries
• Center Pivot Irrigation
• Precision Agriculture
• Precision Irrigation

And, the best part about Google Alerts (other than the fact that it’s FREE and only takes about 10 seconds to set up) is that you can set up as many Google Alerts as you want – the sky is the limit!  

Try out Google Alerts for yourself. Take it for a spin, buy it dinner, and let us know about your experience with Valley-themed Google Alerts in the Comments box below!

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Kelly Cox Global Digital Marketing Manager Kelly joined the Valley Irrigation Global Marketing Department in 2008. Her love of all things geek (steampunk furniture, anime, Doctor Who, and science fiction/fantasy literature, just to name a few) helped shape her appreciation for technology and the web. Kelly is a newlywed and new homeowner, where she shares her geekery with her husband. She considers herself a wine connoisseur (though, 3 buck Chuck is delicious!) and has a love of painting, dance, and singing.