Listening in a Digital Age

Listening in a Digital Age: "Listening in a Digital Age" The key is to create, either on your own or through a paid service, a dashboard that delivers the conversations surrounding topics of interest right to your inbox or browser as part of your measurement suite of analytics.

Your do it yourself toolbox should include:

* Google alerts - Google Alerts allows you set-up customer searches for any phase and receive email or RSS alerts any time your phrase shows up in online media, blogs, web pages and news.
* Search.twitter - For now, monitoring twitter is a separate stream (Google seems to be adding twitter conversations to SERPs) - using the advanced search function allows you set-up very specific searches, even including geographic details. These searches produce RSS feeds and can then be subscribed to.
* tweetbeep.com - Similar to Google Alerts, but for twitter. Set-up search phrases and receive notification any time your phrases show up in twitter conversations.
* Boardtracker.com - focuses on the most popular bulletin board conversations and can turn up responses that don’t show up anywhere else. Some industries still have very heavy bulletin board use.
* Backtype.com - Backtype is a search engine of sorts that focuses on blog comments. Blog comments don’t often make it into the mainstream search results so this is a way to listen in on this set of content.
* Social Mention - this is a mashup search engine of many of the formats of content such as audio and video - I’ve found it a very nice way to turn up some mentions that don’t occur anywhere else.