DISQUS

Chris Brogan: Five Tools I Use for Listening

  • Mack Collier · 1 year ago
    "As part of the social media strategy series, I thought I’d start with listening."

    Which is where any company wanting to launch a social media strategy should start as well. Great stuff as always, Chris, I hope companies curious about social media realize the resource you are giving them here.
  • Jeroen de Miranda · 1 year ago
    Hi Chris,

    Thanks for the tips, will use them
    - especially the Technorati and Summize RSS tip - add them to my Google reader.... makes scanning referencing to my blog so much easier!
  • Rick Wolff · 1 year ago
    That's funny. I went to my BlogLines account and saw I had about 7000 unread items in it. I just unsubscribed to everything. I wonder if I'll miss any of it.
  • Rick Wolff · 1 year ago
    Not as a result of reading this post, you understand. Coincidentally, earlier today.
  • davefleet · 1 year ago
    If you don't have the budget for pro tools like Radian6 or BuzzLogic, you're spot-on with the ones you've listed here.

    I recently used a series of searches in BlogPulse, Technorati and Google Blogsearch, all plugged into Google Reader, to monitor coverage of a major event.

    I'd add another tool to the list to help you focus your attention on the posts you need to pay more attention to - AideRSS. It's easy to use, and they provide fantastic support if you run into trouble.
  • Connie Bensen · 1 year ago
    I'm not sure if you consider paying attention to what people are searching for & what's hitting your blog as 'listening', but I lump them in because it's a part of the big picture.

    For those I would add Feedburner & Google Analytics to your list.

    And one that definitely fits on your list is Joseph Kingsley's Social Media Firehose (using Yahoo pipes). It brings in different results than gAlerts & delivery is in rss, email, netvibes or whatever your pleasure is.
  • Emily Williams · 1 year ago
    This deserves a comment if only for the great picture! In all seriousness though, this is a great post - as someone just starting in social media, I'm finding posts like this to be a godsend. And the fact that I was already using some of these tools gives me confirmation that I'm heading in the right direction! Thanks, Chris.
  • E Stewart · 1 year ago
    When I first read this, I thought that exploring listening as a first step in an SN strategy was sort of putting the cart before the horse, by making the assumption that your company or organization is already "out there," using a blog or other SN tool. Then I went to Technorati to test it out. I did a search for the museum that I work for, and while I did get back a lot of extraneous material, I found two websites referring to my museum that I did not know about. (I had an uh-oh moment, but both were positive.) Moral of the story: we're out there even when we assume we're not. I'll be paying better attention from now on.
  • Ken Burgin · 1 year ago
    Plus of course Google Alerts for instant notification of when me or my company is mentioned online!
  • Nathan Gilliatt · 1 year ago
    There's a lot of variety between the free tools and the high-end options you've listed under The Pro Stuff. In the course of collecting information on about 60 vendors, I've found commercial tools starting under $10/month, though of course capabilities go up with price. Some of the commercial suppliers also offer free versions, which I recently listed:

    http://net-savvy.com/executive/tools/monitoring...
  • Beth Kanter · 1 year ago
    Chris:

    Happy Father's Day!

    Anything with a dog picture catches my attention! I've been using this doggy portrait for listening
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhurd/98812799/

    What an awesome post! Thanks for sharing.

    Here's a case study from the Red Cross about how they use an institutional approach to listening .. AND how they measure the ROI on it.

    http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/03/soci...

    Also, I've been trying to pull together listening exercises for workshop curriculum for nonprofits. I'm going to add your excellent article to the resource list - but here's a few step-by-step projects

    http://socialmedia-listening.wikispaces.com/
  • Johan Bryggare · 1 year ago
    I've put up searches (and feeds) in Twingly and Friendfeed as well.
  • John · 1 year ago
    Chris: Super resource list.
    Beth: http://www.grameen.com/agrameen/index.html - have you seen this piece by Professor Muhammad Yunus? We are putting some attention to the idea of building Social Businesses in the Web2.0. There is some fragmentation in CMS but we have decided to standardize on Bitrix (http://www.bitrixsoft.com) because of the support and access to social networking utilities.
  • Jay Ramirez · 1 year ago
    Thank you for the tools Chris. It's always interesting to see how people use tools to keep up on the information flow.

    What reader do you use for feeds requiring a login like del.icio.us?

    Take care
  • Brad White · 1 year ago
    Thanks for the awesome post and blog! I have really enjoyed your blog since I found it via lifehacker a few months ago.
    Brad
  • Will Kriski · 1 year ago
    When listening to customers, I prefer a direct approach - asking! That means web surveys (I use iPerceptions and survey 10% or so of the visitors if they want to). I provide comments to blog entries, youtube videos, etc. Many people will ask me for what they want to see, or comment on what they liked/disliked.
  • Ricardo Bueno · 1 year ago
    How about Google Alerts? I use google alerts set up for my name, my blog's name and a few others to see who's saying "what" at any given time. I've caught a few spam sites using my content and I've found when others are linking back without necessarily using the trackback feature. Anyway, it's a good way to track when your name, your brand, is being talking about...
  • J.P. · 1 year ago
    Hey! Link Checker is now a very cool addition to my toolbox :-)

    Thanks Chris!
  • Bob Potter · 1 year ago
    I just made an offer to my customers to track their name, product/service, or industry using these and a few other bootstrapping tools. It is an experiment of sorts to see what I can come up with for them and to see how we can use the findings to connect with their customers. I'll let you know the results and the tools I use when I have some data in hand.
  • vickirellas · 5 months ago
    This is a great list and excellent explanation for all of these tools. If there is a bit of budget there is a great company in the UK (now in the US), Media Measurement, that is less than the big guys in the US and does a very thorough job. Easy to work with and very reasonable. It is a good tool for listening and capturing what you can't get with Radian 6 (although they do work with Radian 6 dashboard.)
  • Steffan Antonas · 5 months ago
    @chrisbrogan I use Feedstitch to stitch together RSS feeds from major outlets and skim through the one feed (which puts all news in one feed, in chronological order) in the morning in Google reader. I'll put all social media RSS feeds in one feed stream, for example and scroll through it in 5 mins first thing in the morning. It saves me a ton of time, and ensures I'm looking at the most recent content first all the time. A real productivity boost.
  • Highly Relevant · 4 months ago
    just came across this again in my delicious bookmarks and wanted to thank you for this info...still relevant a year later