There, I said it…market research.

It’s not called Showbusiness for nothing, there are plenty of amazing Actors out there who are incredibly talented but have never had a paid acting job and there’s nothing wrong with that but if you want to make a career from Acting it makes sense to treat it as a business…That means doing all the boring stuff like tax returns, PR and market research.

(yeh yeh Gen, what about this Google Alerts thing) Chill out inner monologue, I’m getting to it.

What is Google Alerts?

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) You enter the topic you want to keep tabs on and they send you an email when there’s a new result.

The alerts get emailed to you at a frequency you chose or you could opt to receive it via an RSS feed if you have a Google account. Users with Google Accounts can also view, create, edit and delete their alerts using the “Manage your Alerts” page.

What can it be used for?

You can have an alert for yourself (err, it’s not vain), any competitors, any productions that you are really keen on, open auditions in your town, casting directors, that TV show you’re owed repeat fees for, your mates, your mum…the list is endless. (Actually I just learnt the list is limited to 1000 per email address but that’s still a fair few)

Let’s take this scenario for example…there’s a Hypothetical Theatre down the road in the town of Blah where you live. They put their castings up on their website but checking their website everyday is absurd. So, you set up a Google Alert for [“Hypothetical Theatre” Blah Casting] and hooray! When they announce their next casting on their website you’ll be the first to know.

That’s a bit sly isn’t it?

You might think it’s a bit sly but PR companies get paid tons to collect clippings for companies and Google themselves suggest using Alerts for the following things:

” – monitoring a developing news story

– keeping current on a competitor or industry

– getting the latest on a celebrity or event”

What about if there’s more than one person with the same name…

There are folk in the world who have completely unique names…Google Alerts for them are simple and straightforward. However, if you’re searching for a person that has a common name and you don’t want updates on everyone with that particular name, Google have thought of this too and have help guides with some advanced tips.

So for example if you’re searching for someone called thingymabob, and there’s another thingymabob who’s a high profile baker, all you need to do is put a minus (-) sign in front of a keyword attached to the other thingymabob you don’t want to know about. Your search would look like this [“thingymabob” -baker]

My top tip

If you haven’t already got a Google account then head on down and get one. Then instead of choosing to have the alerts sent to you vie email you can receive them to your Google Reader as an RSS feed.

[Google Alerts]

Genevieve Sibayan is a London based Actress, you can find Genevieve’s blog here and get updates by clicking on her rss feed. If you’d like to subscribe to The Film Set on Frost Magazine then click here.