Reputation Management and Monitoring Outline
I have a secret confession to make. I love playing around with monitoring tools. I don’t geek out about a lot of things but I really enjoy seeing how comprehensive a monitoring tool is. Over the last year I have tried two different paid services, BuzzLogic and Radian6. Radian6 pretty much blew my mind, it was something to behold and if I had to recommend a paid service to someone that would be it right now.
However for the average person out there, the small businesses, the blogger, and really money conscious clients a paid service isn’t going to work. While Google Alerts are pretty solid they don’t pick up everything. Sometimes you need to create something that is a little more comprehensive. Have no fear though; you can easily construct your own monitoring service using a feed reader. (Personally I like Google Reader.) Below is a breakdown on the services that I use to create a monitoring service. I have used pretty much every free service out there and these were ones that I felt were giving me the best mix of results. (Note: There is going to be a lot of repeat stories in here.)
In this example I am centering it around the search for a companies name, which isn’t going to include searches for other keywords, competition, or the names of executives. I want to keep this simple.
Folder 1: Must reads- This folder contains two services that I feel pick up a good overview of where your name is being mentioned on the web. This is the one folder that I know if I only have a couple of minutes to spend looking that I HAVE to hit. For this I use Google Alerts and I actually pay for Trackur. (I know this is supposed to be about free services. But I am just telling you what I have in my mix.)
Folder 2: Blogs- I have rotated through a few services with this. There are always a few blogs that neither of the services in folder 1 pick up. So I use two services here that pick up the slack Blog Pulse and Technorati. Although I continually debate if I want to drop Technorati or not, I have never seen a site lose value so quickly. Plus the site is sluggish and the feeds have more errors than anyone that I use in this. It does pull up stories that others miss though
Folder 3: Blog Comments- I think 90% of the time it just picks up things from all the Gawker properties but I am still convinced you need to have this in the mix. Backtype is the comment monitoring system that I use right now.
Folder 4: General Social Media- I kind of use this as a backup to everything else. I think Social Mention does a pretty good job monitoring and I view this as backup to view every couple of days. The other services pick up everything here and more but I still like to have this kicking around to see if something might slip through the cracks. (If you don’t use Trackur you may want to put this in folder number 1.)
Folder 5: Message Boards- Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look, message boards. I have witnessed some pretty inspired conversations because of this monitoring tool.
Folder 6: Social Bookmarking- The only service I really monitor here is Digg. I just like to know if any stories mentioning my URL or keywords are put onto the site. Depending on who you are, your site, and a few other factors you will probably hardly get mentioned here but it is still worth monitoring just in case.
Folder 7: Microblogging- I used to have twitter search and a few other things in here but I have really been impressed by the Twingly microblog search. I dumped everything else just to use that.
To fill these folders run a search on these services and then subscribe to the RSS feed in whatever service or tool you prefer. Remember when using most of these services you will want to use quotation marks around the specific name of an item to refine your search.
This has been a pretty effective monitoring tool for me on a personal and professional level and it takes less than half an hour to set it up.
How do you monitor the web?
If your readers focused on the tools you list, they’d have a very comprehensive suite of monitoring tools. Nice work!
Thanks for including Trackur, I’m glad you find it so valuable.
Andy once I saw that it was picking up a lot of items that Google Alerts was missing I was hooked.
Kevin,
This is fantastic. Really a great resource for companies who are looking to get started with monitoring, and a comprehensive, practical approach.
Thanks also for the big shoutout for Radian6. We’re glad to have you as an advocate and fan. :)
Best,
Amber
No problem Amber… You guys are doing great things over there.
The tools are great and keeping it simple for those getting started is great. The list of what you can listen also includes:
* Nonprofit Name
* Other nonprofit names in your space
* Program, services, and event names
* CEO or well-known personalities associated with your organization
* Other nonprofits with similar program names
* Your brand or tagline
* URLs for your blog, web site, online community
* Industry terms or other phrases
Given this, you need listening literacy skills:
* Keywords Are King: Composing and refining keywords
* Seeing the Forest Through The Trees: Pattern analysis and synthesis of findings
* Engaging effectively: Don’t just listen unless your mission is market research
Some more thoughts here:
http://tinyurl.com/abqodg
Without a doubt you should expand what you monitor past the own name of your company. These are some great suggestions.
Wonderful post. One question though – in India, a lot of chatter happens in Orkut message boards. Considering you need to login to follow that chatter, that too across several boards/ communities, is there a way to collect them all in one place and track? A combined Yahoo Pipe perhaps?
Similar story for Facebook Groups too…lot of buzz there too. Anyway to track them more easily?
Tracking these groups on sites that are essentially walled gardens is hard to do. There is a new service that is coming out that has agreements with these sites to go in and scrape it. I don’t know if I am allowed to say who they are as of yet.
What a great article. There are a lot of people out there who want to start monitoring Social Media, but don’t know where to start.
And, hey, if you are interested in checking out some more options for social media monitoring (and beyond), take a look at Spiral16 (www.spiral16.com).
Shawna
I will take a look at it Shawna.
Love the article. We use Google alerts all the time, however, there are gaps that might be filled with the tools you’ve posted. I’ll email this one to myself a project to undertake.
Thanks glad you found it helpful. Google Alerts has lots of gaps that I have seen, it is good to round out the alerts with some specific search targets.
Thanks for the recommendations, Kevin. I think these tools can definitely help small businesses and startups to form a more comprehensive picture of what is being said about them or about the industry in the social web.
Radian6 is of course the upcoming shinning star in this brand management circle. I am psyched about playing with all these tools you mentioned in the post!
Cheers, y*
Yeah they are without a doubt impressive
Great post. Thanks so much! Good comments too.
I just did a trial with Trackur and Radian6, very different in scope and bells and whistles and price. Both companies were very helpful as I explored their results.
Trackur is affordable and straightforward, without fancy bells and whistles. Radian6 is at the very least, 3x more expensive, and has amazing graphics and tools. But, the results were mixed. Trackur, though less expensive, pulled up a bunch of content I didn’t see in Radian6. On the other hand, Radian6 had great international content.
So what this told me is that either I need to back up whatever service(s) I get with the free sources listed in the post above, or, I’m going to need to find out what exactly each of these services picks up and doesn’t pick up and bridge the gap.
Radian6 said they don’t pick up who writes a blog post, just what is in the blog post. While picking up the blog writers names would result in many more entries, not picking up the writers’ names is a significant gap.
There was another area where Radian6 said they only pick up the tags – maybe that was on YouTube. But missing the video title, description and account is missing a lot. Not everyone uses tags well.
Yet Radian6 is a magnificent tool, if an organization chooses to invest at least $600/month for the results, and then whatever it costs for analytical work and reporting.
So my next task, aside from reviewing other monitoring services, is to try to map up which ones cover which dimensions and what they leave out.
With any of the paid ones there are going to be gaps. I have come to just assume that and think about that.
The one good thing about Radian6 is that you can “teach” it to look for certain sites and really improve upon the search. (Yeah it stinks that you have to tech it anything.) But there were other large paid services that I sampled that you couldn’t just add the blogs or sites to be monitored… well you could but you would have to compile a list of sites, mail it in, and wait a month for their tech team to do it. Honestly that was probably the biggest selling point for me with them.
There isn’t a perfect tool though. I mean if there was I wouldn’t be putting together an outline with a bunch of different sites.
I use SharpReader. I am going to have to check out some of the other tools you mentioned … thank you for the article
Kevin,
Thanks for the very insightful post. I’ve tried Trackur as well and was impressed–and the cost is reasonable. I also demo’ed Radian6 and was similarly “blown away” with the feature set. But it’s good to know (and for you and others to promote) that one tool doesn’t do everything. So it’s important to understand and use multiple services. I look forward to checking out several that I was not aware of.
Hi Anora and gang,
Thanks for all the kind words about Radian6. Also wanted to clarify a couple of points above about what our platform captures. We sure do track video titles, users, and descriptions in addition to tags, so that should help there.
Also, we always pick up the author/source of a blog post, and starting with our upcoming release in two weeks, we’ll be including tracking for all post comments, too. So relevant topic profile results that are posted to blog comments will be there for you to see.
Hope that clears up any misconceptions, and we’re always looking for great feedback on our product and what you’d like to see. New features are coming out regularly, and we want to make it a platform that really works for you. So please don’t ever hesitate to reach out; my email and Twitter handle are below! Thanks for all the great insights and comments.
Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community | Radian6
@AmberCadabra
amber.naslund@radian6.com
[...] How to set up reputation management and monitoring for free online | Social Media Answers – nice summary. [...]
Techrigy’s SM2 product is an interesting solution, and they offer freemium accounts with complete functionality (albeit with limited keywords and a cap on stored results).
[...] How to set up reputation management and monitoring for free online | Social Media Answers (tags: monitoring socialmedia internet tools analysis) [...]
[...] As the chief listener for the organization, Wendy honed her listening literacy skills using free tools like google alerts, technorati, RSS reader, and delicious. She would listen, aggregate, analyze, [...]
[...] Similar to all other search engines, Social Mention might not catch everything. If an organization wanted a comprehensive view of their online presence, a secondary check in [...]
[...] Media Answers: Reputation Management and Monitoring Online tweetmeme_url = [...]
[...] to an RSS feed involving search terms or monitor replies. Also using the tools I talk about in this monitoring post you should be able pickup any conversations about your content, make sure you [...]
Nice post! but you fogot about mazecore – http://monitor.mazecore.com
Radian6 is not even publishing their prices online.You can do all the feed free with couple of FREE softwares.At the end,they pull out RSS feed from all the avialable online sources.I use http://managingnews.com/ and add few RSS to it and it gives more less same result apart from fancy graphics.
Mehmet