Handy Tools For Monitoring Conversations Online
I have 18 fabulous free tools to share with you that monitor online buzz/ conversation for companies, with sincere compliments to Marketing Pilgrim.
There are many readily available tools available online that can assist you with tracking companies, reputations and conversations that are happening in the online ether that do not incur a cost. Please note, I am not endorsing these tools as the best/ most effective and the only means to tracking the above. These should be used in adddition with a monitoring strategy that is bespoke to the brand/ company.
The tools, however, are a great way to provide an snapshot of the environment a company and/or person is operating in, what is being said, likes/ dislikes, consumer comments, what the competition is doing and so forth. It will not give indepth, qualitative, well researched conclusions - obviously, as I stated earlier, other methods need to be incorporated into this evaluation process.
1) Track your industry using Moreover and Yahoo:
These sites offer RSS feeds for aggregated industry news and will let you track news that is related to your industry.
2) Track media using Google News:
You can even subscribe to Google alerts relevant to your company, product, a particular person, subject and so forth. You will then get instant RSS updates of relevant news items.
3) Track popular news topics/ buzz using digg and reddit:
These sites will let you track popular submitted news that relates to your business.
4) Track the latest in social media news using my favourite, technorati:
This site will let you track social media sites and and RSS feeds will give you updates whenever a blog mentions the company, subject, person you are tracking for.
5) Search blogs using Google Blog Search
You can set up Google blog alerts to track stories, information you are looking for.
6) Track Blog Comments using Co.mments:
Tools such as this track the comments that people leave on blogs so you can get more insight into what people are saying about a person or company.
7) Track Blog Conversations using BlogPulse:
This site will help you track who is linking to particular blog posts about the relevant company or person.
8) Track Blog Trends using BlogPulse:
This site also lets you track, for example, how well your latest product is going, or a competitor's product. It lets you track whether a keyword is getting growing blog mentions or not.
9) Bookmark using del.icio.us:
This site is pretty much an online bookmarking service that lets people share online. RSS feeds also make it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes the company, person you are tracking.
10) Track photos using Flickr:
You can use this site to subscribe to an RSS feed that tracks that will update you on any new image that matches what you are tracking (person or company).
11) Track videos using YouTube:
This is just one site that will let you search for new videos that may match what you are tracking.
12) Track tags using keotag:
This site lets you track to see if someone is using your relevant company and so forth as a key word.
13) Track forum posts using BoardTracker:
This site tracks what people are saying about your company, people on popular forums. The site will alert you by RSS if your cmpany is mentioned in a thread.
14) Track updates on Wikipedia:
This site lets you track what changes/ updates people are making to your company.
15) Track Patents using Google Patent Search:
This site lets you track patents that have been filed and are relevant to your company/ industry.
16) Track events using Yahoo's Upcoming:
This set lets you track upcoming events/ conferences that match your selected keywords.
17) Track keyword referral using Compete:
This site lets you track which websites get the most traffic for particular keywords.
18) Track anything using Yahoo Pipes:
This site lets you develop your own custom buzz monitoring tool and set up your own RSS tracking.
These are more than enough tools to get you started - so go make tracks!
