MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

Monitoring the Web for Your Blog or Brand

Mar 22, 2009 New

So, you are obsessed with your blog Analytics after reading my Google Analytics for Bloggers Part 1, Part 2,  Part 3 and Part 4 - and now you want to see what others are saying about your brand or blog when they aren’t visiting your blog or directly communicating with your company. Monitoring can give you access to more feedback, and immediate and real-world conversations. Not to mention that today your customers and community expect you to be listening and participating in social media!

If you don’t  think you need to track brand mentions online, or you believe that what your customers are saying on social networks isn’t important – read this post by Brian Solis about how social media is upping the ante on CRM. He says, “While Twitter is the shiny catalyst for corporate introspection, the social web is one big stream that requires listening, empathy, and also engagement and response.” Solis has also shared a great visualization of the social web in the form of a Conversation Prism:

“The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.”

From Brian Solis (Creative Commons)

Without further ado here are some great (and free) ways to monitor the online space:

Google Alerts: Set-up words such as your name, your blog name, your brand name (and any variations), your competitors, or product/industry terms. You can choose to include News pages, Blogs, or comprehensive search. I have found in the past if you set up the alert for brand or product names using comprehensive search it will fill your inbox with  product mentions on e-commerce sites and sales promotions. Instead I set up two alerts for each word- one for blogs and one for news.  Google Alerts allows you to have the alerts set up to be delivered to your Inbox or your Feed Reader.

Delicious: Once you have set up your Del.ic.ious account you can create “Subscriptions” to “tags”.  When users bookmark sites they use ‘tags’ to identify the sites (please refer to Social Bookmarking 101) and a subscription will pull all sites with the term you have subscribed to as a tag. For example if you are interested in websites about “Audi” – subscribe to this term, click on the subscription to view related sites, or click the RSS icon (beside URL) to subscribe in your Feed Reader.

Technorati: If you have blog Alerts set-up through Google this may be a duplication. Technorati does give you additional information with the “authority” ranking for each site. Authority is based on “trackbacks” to the blog, or reactions to the authors work.  You can set up “Watchlists” or simply search using the “Search the Blogosphere” field, and find the RSS icon (above the results) and subscribe using your Feed Reader.

BackType: BackType is a great site to find, follow and share comments in the blogosphere. Visit the Backtype Alerts page to set up your search terms and Backtype will locate where the terms are mentioned in blog comments. Type in the term you want to search, and once again you can subscribe using your browsers RSS icon.

backtweets: Want to see if anyone is “tweeting” your blog or website? Type in the URL and Backtweets will find the tweets – even if the individual used a URL shortening tool. And, of course you can subscribe via RSS.

BackType Connect: Connect allows you to follow the online conversations   for a particular post or article. It connects the “conversational graph,” including: tweets, comments,  links on FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit and other social media. You can’t subscribe to this one as it shows you the conversation around the post at that particular moment, however there is a a toolbar add-on which is great if you want to check engagement for an article or post on the fly.

StumbleUpon: This is another great bookmarking site. It is a great place to see what sites people are sharing, and tagging using your search terms.  You can use the search bar to find sites manually, or subscribe to your chosen “tags”. On the bottom right hand side of your page choose view all tags, then pick the tag you would like to subscribe to via RSS – click on tag link and it will take you to a page showing all your pages that have been tagged with that term. Above the images of the URLS you will see the message: “Meet stumblers who like YOUR_TERM and the pages they recommend” – follow the link and hit subscribe.  This is just one way to accomplish this, anytime you see a tag you like you can click and subscribe.

Twitter Search: Type in your search word into the search box, and then subscribe (right hand side you will see the RSS icon). Simple. For real-time search I use TweetDeck.

YouTube: Once again this one is simple and easy- type the search terms in the search box, click and subscribe using the RSS icon in your browser. If you like any of the videos you can always favorite them for later.

Finally, set some time every week to review your feeds. If you forget this final step you will find yourself pressing the “Mark All as Read” button on a regular basis!

(Think this is too much work? Mitch Joel just posted a great post on optimizing how you monitor your digital footprint.)

Monitoring your blog or brand online gives you access to more feedback from your community members or customers as well as the opportunity to steer conversations and manage your online brand reputation. By listening and engaging you can strengthen relationships and build loyalty to your brand (or blog!).

Do you have any other tools you like to use to monitor the web?

[Note: If you have some money to spend on your monitoring efforts there are a few paid services that give you great tools to make the job easy, allow you to create quick graphs, sort results quickly and manipulate the informatin with ease. I have tested Radian6 and would highly recommend it.  ]

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