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Posted on October 14, 2009
Avoid Ocean Boiling: Four Tactics for Better Social Media Monitoring
BY BEN CASTELLI
"Boiling the Ocean" - a bit of jargon used here at Room 214 to help illustrate the problem many companies have when first venturing into social media monitoring. Many find that there is an overwhelmingly large amount of noise when trying to identify relevant conversations about their brand or industry, often due to a very broad approach to searching for online content.
Recently we have had several clients, partners, and friends ask our advice on how to get started with efficient social media monitoring and there were a couple of common requests:
- Basic but scalable for more advanced monitoring once comfort levels grew
- Easily shared with other individuals in the organization and easy to learn
- Affordable - no budget for an advanced social media monitoring tool such as Radian6.
- Ability to monitor real time conversations across multiple social media platforms including blogs, forums and twitter
To accomplish this list of asks "on the cheap", a one tool solution wasn't an option and a strategy that integrated several tactics was needed. There are dozens of monitoring tools available and selecting the right tools often adds to the complexity of starting a monitoring program. Below is a mix of tools that we have recently proposed and implemented to better monitor relevant online conversations and help companies get started in the first phase of a social media marketing campaign: Listening.
1. Filtrbox
For: Blog, Forum, Mainstream News Monitoring
Filtrbox analyzes online content and uses keywords to filter results. We set up Filtrs with keywords based on themes and included negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic. After several days of monitoring and adjusting the keywords we were able to receive a consistently relevant stream of blog, forum and news posts/comments. We then configured daily email alerts for all posts that met our filtr criteria (forwarded to the entire internal team). As an added level of reducing volume of posts, you can raise the FiltrRank to exclude lower quality sources. As a next level of reducing volume, we recommend identifying who the top influencers are for you company/industry and enter their RSS feeds to monitor them specifically.
2. Hootsuite
For: Twitter Monitoring
When it comes to Twitter monitoring it's gotta be real time. While Filtrbox does have real-time Twitter alerts, for up-to-the-second monitoring and particularly engaging we recommend a Twitter client such as Hootsuite. In Hootsuite, we set up multiple tabs each containing multiple columns to better organize relevant conversations by brand, industry, co-workers, Twitter keyword searches etc... We also compiled a list of all known online influencer Twitter handles and created a group on TweepML so the internal team could easily follow known influencers and organize them into a column in Hootsuite to track them. Another benefit of Hootsuite is that you can login from any computer and multiple users can access the same account.
3. Google Reader
For: Discovering and Monitoring Influential Blogs
Google is our RSS reader of choice for its ease of use and many options for starring/sharing. For this project we had a list of known influential industry blogs and competitor blogs that our client wanted to track. We simply compiled all of the RSS feeds from the blogs and entered them into an OPML file generator. We then had each team member import the OPML file which automatically adds the blog subscriptions to your reader, versus having to add them one at a time. Google Reader also helps you indentify new blogs to subscribe to via the Browse for Stuff link. This is a great tool for searching via keywords and identifying blogs with the most subscribers.
4. Delicious
For: Additional Monitoring, Tagging, Sharing and Collaboration
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. We set up a new Delicious account and recommended the internal team sign up for individual accounts and install the Delicious tool in their browser. We then set up specific tags and trained team members on how to tag relevant posts. Team members could either subscribe to the specific tags in their own Delicious account or subscribe to the feed in their Google Reader to see all tagged content.
The combination of the above 4 tactics was key to a successful, comprehensive monitoring program, i.e. the sum was greater than the parts. After implementation and training on each system, companies were better able to integrate social media monitoring into their busy daily schedules because for the most part, the content was coming to them. This greatly improved awareness for internal teams and identifying opportunities for engagement became much easier.
It's important to note that the stream of content you receive is rarely perfect right off the bat and some tweaking is required. However, a little diligence in the first few days really pays off in delivering an efficient monitoring system with less noise.
Do you have a favorite mix of monitoring tools? Let me know.
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Posted on June 15, 2008
Netflix Feedin' me RSS with FeedFlix
BY BEN CASTELLI
A few months back Stepan showed me interesting new service called FeedFlix. It uses the power of RSS to parse data out of Netflix RSS feeds in order to aggregate and show you some of your basic Netflix user stats. For example I hold onto a movie for an average of 11 days before returning it, average .875 DVD returns each week and 2.33 DVD returns each month. I have been seriously slacking on my Netflix watching recently! In fact according to FeedFlix I am spending $6.08 per movie at this rate… not so hot.
As of now, FeedFlix is still pretty basic in terms of social networking, but it really opened my eyes to fact that Netfix actually had personal and public RSS feeds.
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Posted on November 15, 2007
Google Reader on the iPhone! Review.
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Ever since I got my iPhone one app that was dearly missed was the Google Reader mobile.
Well, the wait is finally over and just a few days ago Google Reader Blog posted the update that they have rolled out some sweet iPhone related and mobile version updates.
The reader works great, its nice and fast, no clutter and everything you need for basic reading is there.
You can easily share or star an item you just read, go to the next unread item or look through your tags and feeds.
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Posted on September 24, 2007
Great Listeners Make Great Conversationalist - True For Offline and Online Conversations
BY JAMES CLARK
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
I love this quote Bill Balderaz has at The Buzz Saw Blog in his Listening to Social Networks post.
I commented on Bill's post that online conversations are very much like offline conversations - the great conversationalist are the great listeners.
To be effective one must have an understanding of the context of the conversation. You don't just scream out to the world, "Listen to me, I'm important", you need to listen and find out what you have of importance to give them.
Start this by setting up your own RSS Reader. If you have not done that yet, we've created a online video tutorial Getting Started with Google Reader for setting up a Google Reader to track listen to online conversations.
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Posted on March 4, 2007
Google Reader would be the sickest RSS client . . .
BY JAMES CLARK
Louis Gray kicked this off with a list of 10 things that could improve Google Reader, which I saw via Scoble.
They're good and pretty comprehensive in light of the meme started by Jeremiah Owyang about "media consumption diets", I would say timely as that conversation begins to unfold. More on that over the next few days.
My 2 cents:
With my two pennies in the pot Google Reader could become a viable enterprise level RSS reader and become the leader in web based RSS aggregation. And with a price tag like 2 pennies less than my thoughts it would be difficult for a decision maker to pass on using a trusted name like "Google" over Bloglines or Rojo.Penny 1 - Support authenticated feeds.
Penny 2 - Support server-side sessions through feeds for other scripts to deliver authenticated pages or media.
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