How to get Slack alerts when your company is in the news

To get Slack alerts when your company is in the news, you need two pieces: something that searches the news for your company on a schedule, and something that posts what it finds into a Slack channel. Slack doesn't search the news on its own, so the first piece always comes from another tool.

The free route most teams start with is Google Alerts. You create an alert for your company name at google.com/alerts and choose its settings: how often it runs (as it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week), which sources it covers (such as news, blogs, or the whole web), the language and region, and whether you want only the best results or all of them. Under "Deliver to," choose RSS feed instead of email. That gives you a feed address, and Slack's RSS app can subscribe a channel to it so each new result appears as a message. Zapier and Make can do the same job and let you format the message. Talkwalker Alerts works much like Google Alerts and also offers RSS delivery. Paid media monitoring tools such as Meltwater, Mention, and Brand24 cover more sources and come with their own Slack connections.

All of these routes find matches well. The trouble is what a match is. A keyword alert fires whenever your name appears, so a company called Beacon or Atlas gets every story about lighthouses or maps. A single wire story reprinted by thirty local outlets arrives as thirty messages. And every alert looks the same, whether it's a feature in the trade publication your buyers read, a press release you paid to distribute, or a reporter getting a fact about your product wrong. A channel that fills up with noise gets muted, and then the story that mattered goes unread.

That judgment is the real job. A good result is a short stream of alerts that are actually about your company, each one saying what the story says, why it matters to your team, and what you could do about it while the story is still fresh.

Kite does that work for you. It keeps a news watch on your company, decides which new stories deserve your attention, and brings them to Slack with the next step ready.

Start by asking Kite in the Slack channel where you want the alerts to arrive, such as your #press or #marketing channel:

"Let us know in this channel whenever our company shows up in the news."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack, and once you add Kite to Slack, it can keep standing watches like this one and report what they find in your channels.

By the time you ask, Kite already knows your company name, your products, your website, and your competitors from its research on your business. It uses that to settle what the watch should search for before it starts. If your company name is also an ordinary word, Kite proposes pairing it with your product names or your website address so the watch looks for you instead of the word. Confirm the terms or adjust them, and Kite sets up the watch.

You don't need a news monitoring account or any other connection. Kite finds stories through its own built-in web search, and it reports them in Slack.

Kite searches the web for recent news that names any of the terms you agreed on. Those are usually your company name, your product names, and your website address. You can add the names of your founders or executives if coverage of them counts as coverage of the company, or a past company name that reporters still use.

The terms are what keep the watch useful. A narrow set of terms that only describe you produces sharp alerts, and you can widen the watch later if it misses something. If your request doesn't name any terms and Kite can't work them out from what it knows, it asks you for them before it creates anything.

Kite checks the news watch about every six hours, and you can ask for checks as often as once an hour. Each check judges only what has appeared since the last one. Kite remembers the stories it has read for the past month, so an article that stays near the top of the search results for weeks doesn't trigger a second alert.

Kite finds stories through web search, so a new article shows up once search has picked it up. After a watch reports a story, it rests for a day before checking again. The next check still catches everything published in the meantime, so a busy news day produces a few useful messages instead of a stream.

Kite reads each new result and decides whether it's news coverage that actually names your company, as opposed to a page that happens to share a word with your name. When a result passes, Kite opens the article itself and reads what it says.

Then Kite checks what your team already knows. It reads your team's knowledge base, including your goals, your launches, your competitors, and earlier conversations, and it reads the last day of activity in your Slack channels. If someone has already shared the story, or Kite has already told you about it, Kite stays quiet. When the same story is reprinted by other outlets days later, Kite recognizes it as the story you've already heard about and only speaks up when something has changed, such as a correction or a follow-up piece.

When Kite finds a story worth your attention, it posts in the Slack thread or channel where you asked for the watch. Each alert covers three things:

• What happened. The publication, the headline, a link to the story, and what it says about your company, including any figures or quotes it attributes to you.
• Why it matters to your team. Kite ties the story to something your team is working on, such as a launch it covers, a competitor it mentions beside you, or a claim about your product that doesn't match your positioning.
• The next move and who makes it. If your team's records name an owner for press or communications, Kite names that person. It then offers the next step, which is often already done and waiting for a yes.

Alerts land in that thread for about three months. After that, they go to the main channel your team uses with Kite, with a link back to the original thread, so the history of the watch stays in one place.

Kite does the follow-up work in the same message whenever the story makes the next step clear. Coverage worth celebrating can come with a LinkedIn or X post written in full, ready to share. A story that gets a detail wrong can come with a correction request written for the publication. Each draft sits under the alert with Change and Skip buttons, and nothing goes out until someone on your team says so.

When the story calls for a change to your own website, such as adding it to your press page or answering a claim on a comparison page, and Kite hosts that site, Kite drafts the change first. The alert says what the draft changes, and it goes live only when someone approves it. When the right next step is bigger, such as a pitch to the reporter for a follow-up story or a response plan for negative coverage, Kite proposes the work with a Go button and starts as soon as you press it. A draft nobody acts on waits for a week before Kite sets it aside.

You manage the watch by asking Kite in Slack. You can pause it and resume it later, stop it for good, or change the terms it searches for. You can also ask why a watch exists, and Kite tells you the request or conversation it was set up from.

When the watch is running, your Slack channel becomes a short, reliable feed of the news coverage that is actually about your company, with the response work started.