Social Monitoring Tools and the Art of Listening
I was having lunch this week in a very busy restaurant when I noticed that I could hear about three different conversations taking place. I was tempted to listen in, because each table group was talking about a topic for which I find interesting. So I decided I wanted to hear what they had to say. Now typically this type of activity is usually considered impolite in public settings so I couldn’t help feeling guilty of spying. But my curiosity moved me to capture what I could. Three topics that interested me; scuba, a difficult manager, the pros and cons of hybrid and electric vehicles.
These conversations were merely lunchtime conversations and they were not conversations I should be listening too. I wanted to join into their conversations – but that would have been creepy – so I squashed the urge.
But online, we can listen and contribute to any conversation! How crazy is that. We are way beyond the “chat rooms” of the early web. Now that people are talking and allowing others in, we can join any number of conversations and engage strangers into a dialog with no introduction. Talk to a stranger on a train? Not likely. Engage a stranger on Twitter? Entirely acceptable.
We now have access to the experience, knowledge and insight of a massive number of people at any given time. So how do marketers take advantage of this opportunity to spy on conversations related to topics that could have an impact on their brand or revenues? How can we get involved and be part of conversations when they are happening?
Even if you have no social media accounts you can still do some listening. There are many approaches to listening. If you haven’t started you, here are a few tools you can try out to get started.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
RowFeeder tracks the terms that you care about either in a real time Google Docs spreadsheet or download rich excel reports on the fly.
Backtype helps companies understand their social impact.
Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.
How Sociable measures visibility.
Omgili is a forum search engine lets you find communities, message boards, discussion threads about any topic. Omgili’s advanced search features make it the best search engine for forums out there.
Socialmention is real-time social media search and analysis.
Surchur is a real-time dashboard.
IceRocket for blog search.
Boardreader for community search.
Sales Rescue Team blog provides a list of 195 social monitoring tools which is the best list I have found on the topic.
What is your favorite monitoring tool and why?