Social media monitoring changes

When you're monitoring blogs and social media for mentions of your company's brand, or product, or your spokesperson or the big issues that might lead to you getting some extra press coverage, a simple way to do it is to use Google Blog Search, type the phrase in that you want to monitor and then you can subscribe to bulletins through RSS or email alerts. Google isn't the only blog search engine that can help you do this. Technorati and Blogpulse also do the trick. Google is very simple and quick, Technorati is good at prioritising 'importan' blogs over the smaller ones, and Blogpulse is good at running graphs of your blog coverage.

And I have always, when needing to monitor something fairly important, used all three. One will always pick up on something that the others don't, and that could be the mention of a company rumour or product issue that you need to act on. The belt and braces approach, so to speak.

But recently I'm finding that these three search tools are bringing back very similar results. 99% of the time, when a story pops up in my RSS reader, it will appear in all three blog searches.

So it looks like I might be able to do a litte de-cluttering and cut down on the number of feeds I need to check for my client work. One set of results is going to do the trick. And tip for anyone that does the same thing, it might be a safe time to choose your one blog tracking tool and forget about having to keep hold of the rest.

Comments

[Ben Matthews]

Which one will you be using - Google Reader, Technorati or Blogpulse?

I'll be sticking with Google Reader for the moment...

[Richard Millington]

I've generally found Google to be pretty good at picking up almost everything.

It's like a lot of technologies now, they've been refined and improved so much that further improvements are likely to go almost unnoticed

[Drew]

Google is pretty good, but it used to miss changes to peoples blogrolls for example, or sidebars. It only picks up post titles and content. I think like you said Richard, they've gotten better.

So Ben, I'll stick with Google Blog Search for my tracking, and Bloglines for my feed reader (although Twitter's eating into that a lot)...

[Melanie Seasons]

I use Google Blog Search for the most part. It picks up (almost) everything. The only thing I use technorati for is to find trackbacks for the client's URL. Occasionally it will pick up a post that Google missed, but not often. It's also a good way to demonstrate the link building that should be a part of a campaign's deliverables.

[Marcel LeBrun]

Hi Drew,
I hear a lot of PR pros who start out with these tools which work ok for a low volume of content. Most PR pros I talk to who do monitoring, crisis management or social media engagement find themselves wanting a better solution because they end up spending too much time with the manual work (cutting/pasting, counting, sorting, etc.) and spend less time in the high value area of gathering insights and making client recommendations (I hear the term "RSS Reader Hell").

Another factor is that social media is no longer just about blogs so a proper coverage requires directly monitoring many additional sites including video sites, images, microblogs like twitter, social networks, etc. These are all important if you don't want to miss anything.

There are also professional tools designed specifically for PR which provide comprehensive coverage of all of these social media sources, plus provide you with conversation analytics and enabling things like influencer analysis so you can find the most influential communities and engage with them [disclosure: shameless plug - my company Radian6 provides this social media monitoring & analysis tool].

This allows the PR pro to focus on the communications, insight, engagement, etc. I'd love to hear what you think & if you have experienced the challenges above (and how they relate to the volume of content for the topics you are tracking).

Regards,
Marcel

[Darika]

I agree with Marcel. Once you start intensely monitoring across a range of clients you want to drill down more into social media coverage.
Melanie points out the link building elements, but also tracking yours and your competitor's share of "buzz", as well as spotting trends within those conversations. For example consistent negative feedback around a product after a launch.
All the free tools are great, but labour intensive, and it's nice to automate some of the analysis for busy PROs

[Chris Reed]

Hey Drew - I've come to this late in the discussion (checking unread rss feeds on a Sunday night?!) - but you haven't mentioned Yahoo Pipes - there's some pretty good aggregators/sorters in there for free.

I use pipes a bit to do exactly that de-duping you suggest, as well as bespoke (and paid for) tools, as Marcel suggests.

[Drew]

Hi Chris. Yes I use Yahoo Pipes and it's great for consolidating feeds. A bit fiddlu but good.

Marcel - I think I'm going to write a post as a response to your comment as it'll be too long to go here.

[Chris Reed]

Thought/assumed that would be the case.

Like your new post too - spot on.

[Sandrine]

When I need to monitor something, I tend to use the 3 tools (Technorati, Google and BlogPulse). Plus over the last few months, I have been using Twitter Tracking, which enables you to follow what people are saying about a product, a brand. Just type "Track X" and you'll get notified with all the Tweets on X.