If you want to effectively engage with people in social media, you need to know when your brand is mentioned somewhere.
Google Alerts is one way to do this: The free service will notify you as soon as the Google robot finds a new page on the web mentioning the keywords that interest you. But what if you want something a bit more specific to social media rather than the web at large?
Enter the ‘Social Media Firehose‘ - a daft name for a very useful little tool built using Yahoo Pipes. You enter your keywords and it generates a feed of matching social media content from blogs, Twitter, and other sources. If you’re technically minded (or know someone who is) you could easily use Yahoo Pipes to modify the Firehose to cater for any subtleties relating to your brand.
Found via Church of the Customer blog (thanks guys!) Check out the post over there for the full story of how Kingsley Joseph - a smart cookie from salesforce.com uses Yahoo Pipes to keep tabs on where they’re being talked about - it’s a good case study about listening to social media.
Tom wrote this on 06.04.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, Social media box
Last night, while half watching an episode of Skins on Channel 4 and half messing about with BBC iPlayer, I spotted that a new episode of Ashes to Ashes was available to download. Slightly miffed that there didn’t seem to be any way of getting an update prompt when a new episode of a show is released I twittered a flippant (yet fortunately expletive free) remark.
Minutes later I found I had a new Twitter contact. Some bloke called James Cridland had obviously been tracking the keyword “iPlayer” and a quick visit to his site revealed him to be the Head of Future Media & Technology at BBC Audio & Music Interactive. Turns out that he was interested in finding out what I’d meant by my off the cuff tweet and I explained (in 140 characters or fewer) how neat it would be if new episodes would “automagically add themselves to the download manager. Or it’d prompt you. I expect you’re already thinking about this :)”… Of course, it turns out that they are. Because he told me.
Morals from this story?
Firstly, the BBC still kick ass.
Secondly, never underestimate the powers of your own actions online (no matter how insignificant or throwaway they initially seem).
Thirdly, the wealth of opinions about your entity (organisation, product or even person) have never been so readily available. Actively listen to your critics, users or visitors, like James is, harness that information… and use it to make something better!
What is tracking? (From the Twitter FAQ):
Tracking is an SMS or IM only feature that allows you to receive all twitters that match a word you’re tracking. For example, if you send track Obama, you will receive all updates that match “Obama.” All updates sent from tracking will begin with parenthesis. You can easily stop getting these messages by sending untrack Obama.
More about buzz monitoring
Read ‘Essential Buzz Monitoring‘, Chapter 5 of our FREE e-book - “A Marketers Guide to Social Media”.
This is a user-friendly, no-jargon guide with great examples and useful tips on how to use the latest digital techniques to make your online campaigns successful. Essential reading for marketers.
Download the PDF from our ebooks section, and sign up for notification of future chapters while you’re there.
Trevor May wrote this on 22.02.08 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, RSS, Social networks box
