# How we monitor brand mentions A daily agent that searches news, social platforms, and forums for new mentions of our brand, classifies sentiment, and posts a digest of the notable or negative ones to Slack — each with a suggested response drafted for a human to review. Canonical page: https://kortix.com/use-cases/brand-monitor Brand mentions show up wherever people happen to be talking — a news writeup, a Reddit thread, a tweet, a forum post comparing us to a competitor. Most days nothing needs a response. Some days a single negative post with real reach needs one within the hour, and the team doesn't find out until it's already been seen by everyone else. We run a brand-monitor agent on Kortix that checks the web every day for new mentions, classifies each one's sentiment, and posts a digest to our marketing Slack channel. It never replies or posts anywhere itself — for anything notable, it drafts a suggested response and leaves the sending to a person. - **Team:** Kortix - **Runs on:** Daily cron, reusable session - **Connected systems:** The web · Slack - **Mode:** Search-only · draft, never post ## The problem Brand mentions aren't confined to one platform. They land in news coverage, social posts, and forum threads on no predictable schedule, and most of them don't matter — a passing mention, a neutral comparison, a repost. The ones that do matter are indistinguishable from the noise until someone actually reads them, and by the time a person gets around to checking, a negative post with real reach has often already had its worst hour. The usual workarounds don't fix this. A Google Alert fires on keyword matches with no sense of sentiment or reach, so every alert looks the same regardless of whether it's a five-word tweet or a widely shared negative review. Checking manually catches yesterday's mentions today, if someone remembers to look. Either way, nothing tracks what's already been seen, so the same viral post gets flagged again tomorrow. ## What we built A daily cron re-prompts a persistent agent session. Each run searches the web for new mentions of the brand across news, social platforms, and forums, checks each one against a ledger of mentions it has already reported, classifies the sentiment of anything new, and posts a digest to Slack — a one-line rollup for routine mentions, and a full callout with a suggested response draft for anything notable or negative. It never posts, replies, or comments anywhere; the only output is the Slack digest. ## How it works ### Run on a daily reusable session A **cron trigger** fires the project once a day, re-prompting the same **session** rather than starting from a blank slate. Because the session is reusable, it remembers what it already reported yesterday and only surfaces what's new today. ### Give the agent the brand to watch The brand name, aliases, product names, and common misspellings to search for live as **skills** and **memory**, along with the running ledger of every mention already seen. When the brand adds a product line or a new alias starts getting used, the watch list is updated the same way. ### Search and fetch the web Through the sandbox's **built-in web search and fetch** — no connector, no login, no credential, because these are public pages — plus a scoped **Slack connector** for the digest, the agent can: - **Search news, social platforms, and forums** — for the brand terms on the watch list, this run only. - **Fetch the full text of each candidate mention** — enough to classify sentiment and reach, not just a search snippet. - **Post to Slack** — one digest per run, in the marketing channel. ### Set the guardrails The agent only searches and reads public pages, and it only ever writes to one Slack channel. It never replies to a post, comments, or publishes anywhere on the open web — for anything flagged as notable, it drafts a suggested response and clearly marks it as a draft awaiting human approval. Any credential it needs is encrypted in the secrets manager and injected at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to. ### Post the digest Each run ends with one Slack message: how many new mentions were found, a sentiment breakdown, and — for anything negative or notable — the source, the excerpt, why it was flagged, and a suggested response draft. Routine mentions get a one-line rollup instead of a full callout. The team reads one digest and decides what, if anything, to say back. > **The pattern** > A daily **cron** re-prompts a reusable **session** that searches the web for > brand mentions, dedupes against a **memory** ledger of what's already been > reported, classifies sentiment, and posts a Slack digest. Anything notable > gets a suggested response — drafted, never sent. ## Guardrails The agent watches public conversation about the brand, so its access is scoped to searching and reading, with a single, narrow output: - **Isolation.** Every run happens in its own isolated sandbox, and only the Slack digest it's explicitly allowed to send is written back out. - **Scoped secrets.** Any credential the agent uses is encrypted in the secrets manager and injected into the sandbox at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to or the logs. - **Draft, never post.** The agent's only external action is one Slack digest per run. It never replies, comments, or posts on the platform where a mention appeared — a suggested response is a draft for a human to review and send themselves. - **Everything is code.** The brand terms, the watch scope, and the sentiment and notability rules are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed **change request** rather than a dashboard setting. ## The outcome - **Every day:** New mentions found without anyone remembering to check - **Dedupe by design:** Already-reported mentions never resurface - **Draft only:** A suggested response, never a reply the agent sends itself The team no longer finds out about a negative mention secondhand, and no one re-reads yesterday's viral post because it was flagged twice. The channel gets one digest a day — quiet on quiet days, specific and actionable when something needs a response — and every response that goes out is one a person chose to send.