The Real Cost of Missing a Critical Mention
Imagine this: a popular tech blogger posts a detailed comparison of tools in your category on Hacker News. Within hours, the thread has 200 comments, several people are asking about alternatives, and your competitor's founder jumps in with a thoughtful response. By the time you discover the thread three days later, the conversation is dead and the opportunity is gone.
This scenario plays out every day for companies that rely on manual monitoring or basic Google Alerts. The internet moves fast. Community conversations have a short shelf life. And the difference between catching a mention in the first hour versus the first week can be the difference between winning a customer and losing one.
That's why we built Kaulby's alert and digest system from the ground up to be fast, smart, and configurable. Here's how it works and how to set it up for maximum impact.
How Kaulby's Alert System Works
Kaulby continuously scans 17 platforms for your monitored keywords. When new mentions are found, they flow through our AI analysis pipeline (sentiment detection, categorization, pain point identification) and then into our alert system. From there, you have three ways to receive notifications.
Instant Alerts
For time-sensitive mentions, instant alerts deliver notifications the moment a relevant mention is detected. These are ideal for:
- Brand crisis monitoring: Know immediately when negative sentiment spikes
- Competitor vulnerability windows: Catch threads where frustrated competitor users are looking for alternatives
- High-intent buying signals: "Can anyone recommend a tool for..." posts that have a short response window
- Review responses: New reviews on Google, G2, Trustpilot, or Yelp that need quick replies
Instant alerts can be delivered via email, webhooks (for Slack, Teams, or custom integrations), or both. You configure the delivery method per monitor, so your brand monitoring alerts can go to email while your competitor monitoring alerts trigger a Slack notification.
Daily Digests
Daily digests compile all of the previous day's mentions into a single, organized email. Each digest includes:
- Mention count by platform and sentiment
- AI-generated summary of key themes and trends
- Top mentions ranked by engagement and relevance
- Sentiment breakdown showing positive, negative, and neutral distribution
- Action items highlighting mentions that likely need a response
Daily digests are perfect for teams that want to stay informed without being interrupted throughout the day. Review your digest over morning coffee, identify the mentions that matter most, and allocate your engagement time strategically.
Weekly Digests
Weekly digests provide a broader view, summarizing an entire week's worth of community activity into a comprehensive report. These are especially valuable for:
- Leadership and stakeholders who need a high-level view without the daily detail
- Trend identification: Patterns become visible at the weekly level that aren't obvious day-to-day
- Product teams looking for recurring feature requests or pain points
- Marketing teams tracking share of voice and brand perception over time
The weekly digest includes everything in the daily digest, plus week-over-week comparisons, trending topics, and the AI's assessment of the most significant developments.
Configuring Your Alert Strategy
The best alert setup depends on your role, your team size, and how quickly you need to respond. Here are proven configurations for different scenarios.
Solo Founder or Small Team
When you're wearing multiple hats, you need alerts that are informative but not overwhelming.
- Brand monitoring: Daily digest + instant alerts for negative sentiment only
- Competitor monitoring: Weekly digest (to stay aware without daily distraction)
- Reddit monitoring: Instant alerts for high-intent keywords ("recommend," "alternative," "looking for")
Growth or Marketing Team
For teams actively using community engagement as a growth channel.
- Brand monitoring: Instant alerts to email + Slack channel
- Competitor monitoring: Daily digest + instant alerts for competitor complaints
- Lead-intent monitoring: Instant webhook to Slack with high-priority flagging
- Weekly summary: Sent to the whole team every Monday morning
Enterprise or Multi-Product
Larger teams need structured alert routing to avoid noise and ensure the right people see the right mentions.
- Product mentions: Routed to product-specific Slack channels via webhooks
- Review site alerts: Instant to customer success team
- Competitive intelligence: Daily digest to strategy team
- Crisis alerts: Instant to leadership for mentions with strongly negative sentiment + high engagement
- Executive summary: Weekly digest to C-suite
Smart Alert Features
Kaulby's alert system goes beyond simple keyword matching. Here are the intelligent features that make it practical for real-world use.
AI-Powered Relevance Filtering
Not every keyword match is relevant. If you're monitoring "Mercury" (the fintech company), you don't want alerts about the planet or the element. Kaulby's AI analyzes the context of each mention and filters out irrelevant matches, dramatically reducing false positives.
Sentiment-Based Triggers
Configure alerts to trigger only for specific sentiment levels. Want to know immediately when someone posts a negative review? Set up a negative-sentiment-only instant alert. Prefer to only see positive mentions for social proof collection? That works too.
Engagement Thresholds
Some mentions are more impactful than others. A Reddit post with 500 upvotes carries more weight than one with 2. You can set engagement thresholds so that you're only alerted when mentions reach a certain level of visibility.
Deduplication
Cross-posted content (the same review on multiple platforms, a discussion that spans Reddit and Hacker News) is automatically detected and consolidated. You won't get four alerts for what is essentially one conversation.
Best Practices for Alert Management
Even with smart filtering, alert fatigue is real. Here's how to keep your alert system valuable over time.
- Start conservative, expand later. Begin with daily digests only. Once you understand your mention volume and patterns, add instant alerts selectively for the highest-value scenarios.
- Review and refine monthly. Check your alert configurations once a month. Are you ignoring certain alerts? Turn them off. Are you missing important mentions? Add new triggers.
- Use different channels for different urgency levels. Email for daily digests. Slack for instant alerts that need team attention. Webhooks for integration with your CRM or support tools.
- Assign ownership. On a team, make sure someone is responsible for reviewing each alert type. Unowned alerts get ignored.
- Track response time. Measure how quickly your team responds to high-priority alerts. Set internal SLAs (for example, respond to negative reviews within 4 hours) and use Kaulby's analytics to track adherence.
Getting Started With Alerts
Setting up alerts in Kaulby takes about two minutes:
- Step 1: Create or edit a monitor with your target keywords and platforms
- Step 2: Navigate to the Alerts tab and choose your notification preferences (instant, daily, weekly)
- Step 3: Configure delivery channels (email, webhook URL, or both)
- Step 4: Set optional filters (sentiment, engagement threshold, platform)
Instant alerts and email digests are available on Pro and Team plans. Free plan users can explore the brand monitoring features and upgrade when they're ready for full alert capabilities. Visit the pricing page to compare plans.
Never miss an important mention again. Start your free Kaulby account and configure smart alerts that keep you informed without the noise. Your community is talking 24/7. Now your alert system can keep up.