Did you know that everyone’s talking about you? Well they could be, but are you paying attention?
There are so many listening tools out there that I’m just going to focus on some of the free ones that you can set up and then forget about. Then I’ll also offer some ideas for what to search for.
Whether or not you respond to those talking about you, it’s useful to know what’s going on. And if you decide to monitor your competitors you may also get some great ideas as well!
Decide what’s relevant
All the tools in the world won’t help you if you look for the wrong keywords! So here are some examples:
The must listen to stuff:
- Company name(s)
- Product or project name(s)
- Key stakeholder(s)
Competitor / Partners Information
- Competitors – by company name
- Competitors’ Products
- Competitors’ key stakeholders – I don’t do this, but depending on your requirements it may be beneficial
Ideas to explore
- Potential phrases of interest
- Niche topic areas
Sometimes there are terms that are too popular to search so you might want to pick additional keywords based on its variants.
There are always going to be false positives (results that are not relevant) but you’ll start to notice a difference after tweaking your terms for a few weeks.
Pick your search tools
There are many tools to use for listening that will help you keep up together with what’s happening out there with regards to yourself and your brand. Here are some tools that I use:
1. Google Alerts – easy and helpful and you can have new search results from the web, news, blogs, etc. delivered directly to your email
2. Summize – searches within Twitter conversations. After searching, click “Feed for this query”
3. Technorati Advanced Search - allows subscribing to specific blog tags. This can be much more specific than searching for it as a Google Alert term.
4. Blogdigger – searches blogs, but is very similar to Google Alerts. After searching, click the RSS icon in the upper right corner
Other Aggregation Tools
There are great lists of tools available so try some out as they may well be better suited for you …
I use other tools for tracking what individuals or companies are saying themselves. That’s an important part of the process but I won’t elaborate here since it’s a much bigger topic – if you’d like me to post about that sooner rather than later leave a comment 
One bit of advice is now that you’ve spent all this time setting up alerts, there may be others who can benefit from this insight at your organisation – so pass this on
Getting these aggregation tools) into place takes just 15-30 minutes, and then you’ll need to make occasional modifications to keep things relevant.
The biggest challenge you’ll face is really just fine tuning your keywords.
Hopefully something here was new or helpful. If you have any tools you’d recommend for monitoring the conversation add them to the comments below
If you liked this post please re-tweet it, plus you may like to subscribe to my RSS feed for future updates…
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Lee this is a very interesting post. One thing I would like is if you could add the links to those tools for us.
Thanks
PS: will RT
Thanks Robbie for pointing that out
Links are now above. And thanks for the RT…