Saturday, August 8, 2009

Monitoring Tools


Part 1 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement:

Brand Overviews
  • HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
  • Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
  • socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ’social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.
Blog Search Tools
  • TECHNORATI Search - Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
  • TECHNORATI Advanced - Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
  • Google Blog Search - Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
  • IceRocket - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
  • BlogPulse - Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.


Buzz Tracking
  • Serph - Track buzz in real time
  • Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
  • Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
  • BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
  • Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
  • eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.
Message Board Search Tools
  • BoardTracker - tracks words in forums
  • BoardReader - Search multiple message boards and forums.
  • Omgili - Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
  • Google Groups - Searches usenet groups.
  • Yahoo! Groups - Searches all Yahoo! Groups.
Twitter Search Tools
  • Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which “self-refreshes”. See what’s happening — ‘right now’.
  • Twitstat - Twitter Tweitgeist - Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
  • TweetScan - search for words on Twitter
  • Twit(url)y - see what people are talking about on Twitter
  • Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
  • TweetBeep - Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
  • Twitrratr - Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
  • TweetMeme - View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
  • TwitScoop – Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
  • Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.
Web Site Traffic
  • Compete - Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
  • Quantcast - Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
  • Alexa - Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
  • BlogFlux Page Rank - Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.
Search Data
  • Google Trends - Search trends and see search volume by country and region.
  • Google Insights - Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
  • Wordtracker Keywords - Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.
  • Yahoo! Keyword Tool - Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month’s search data.
  • FACEBOOK LEXICON - Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.
  • Google Keyword Tool – Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.
Multimedia Search
Social Bookmarking
  • Digg - Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
  • StumbleUpon - Social bookmarking - general cool stuff
  • Delicious - Social bookmarking
Feed Aggregator
  • Yahoo Pipes - Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome.
URL cruncher
  • Bit.ly - URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc
Specific Social Network Tracking
  • Adonomics - Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing.
Search Engine rankings
Advertising and Event Tracking
  • MediaHound - Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.
Start by setting up a folder for the brand you want to monitor, this of course could be yourself.
Next create 7 folders: Must Reads, Blogs, Comments, Message Boards, Social Bookmarkting, Microblogging, and General …
Folder 1 - Must Reads: this folder contains 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 Yahoo Alerts.
Folder 2 - Blogs: consist of most user generated content that doesn’t get picked up as news or alert. Use Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse and Technorati
Folder 3 - Comments: pick up comments and opinions of all those users who don’t write full blogs. use Backtype.
Folder 4 - Message Boards: interesting topics here; Board Reader does a good job at following conversations where people often forget to look.
Folder 5 - Social Bookmarking: follow services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
Folder 6 - 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… or of course, use any of the tools from my Twitter Tools post.
Folder 7 - General: So thus far I’ve been just teasing, I like all those tools but 9 out of 10 times I don’t set any of them up … The quick solution is to use some mass social media search engine such as Serph, Keotag, and my favorite, Social Mention.
I have all this set up and it allowed me to find every tweet, every blog post, every comment about my panel at SXSW the same day they were posted. So try it for yourself, you’ll see how addicting is to find everything that everyone says about you or your brand
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