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Monitoring the Social Buzz

Monitoring the Social Buzz

Note: This is a post by guest blogger Carley Oberdoerster

Tracking your online presence, specifically with in the social media realm can provide key insight into the web buzz being generated by your company. Currently there are a wide array of tools available on the market to assist you with this task.

From free options such as simple alert tools and blog search engine trackers to sophisticated market sentiment analysis platforms which aggregate qualitative and quantitative data from across the entire social media internet.

As there are currently over 100 applications available and more companies entering the space all the time, I have outlined a few free and paid options that seem to have the best reputation.

FREE

• Nielsen’s Blogpulse: Analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. A free service by Nielsen that allows you to enter key words or trend up to 3 key phrases and create a graph.

• Google Alerts: Is a simple and free alert tool which allows you to set up key word ( ie: your company name/brand information/campaign titles) alerts to be tracked across news, social media, video, or blog networks. An alert email with up to 50 results is sent to you either “as it happens”, “once a day”, or “once a week”.

Paid

TrackUR: Presents the “60-second reputation monitoring. Guaranteed!”. With costs ranging from $18-297 a month and an easy sign up, this is a popular application marketed as sophisticated but easy to use. TrackUR’s has tools such as Trackur Influence which provide website influence analysis scores (a number out of 100) on pages that mention the phrase you are tracking.

Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics: Identifies consumer based Social Media monitoring as Consumer-Generated Media (CGM) Measurement. Buzz Metrics has created a customizable dashboard which includes things like Brand Association Maps, ThreatTracker, BrandTracking, and Audit ScoreCard reports.

Crimson Hexagon: Has created a patent-pending Opinion Analysis Platform developed at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The company identifies this as “A hybrid statistical algorithm amplifying human intelligence”.

Radian6:  Also offers a customized dashboard with all full suite of options including trend monitoring, influencer tracking, a crisis management solution, and many more dashboard “widgets”. They also have enterprise integration capabilities with Salesforce.com and Webtrends which allows you to merge your customer relationship and analytic data into the Radian6 platform.

NEXT STEPS

As I mentioned putting an ear up to the relevant conversations happening in the social media realm regarding your company is an important step in measuring the effectiveness of your online communication strategies and overall brand health. When planning an analysis it’s important to set objectives (what are you goals), listen the feedback (view the metrics with an analytical eye), and take action to evolve your online communication strategy.

Carley Oberdoerster is a Communications professional living in Boston. She currently works at ThomsonReuters as a Product Specialist managing online Investor Relations and Public Relations products. Her background includes a client roster of several Fortune500 accounts and international work experience in both Hong Kong and London. Carley received her B.A. from Michigan State University in Organizational Communications and holds a Digital Graphic Design certificate from New England Institute of Art.”

About the author / Jillian Koeneman

Juiced about social media & digital. Entrepreneur. Founder @freshlimemktg | Connector. #MSU Alum. #Detroit native. Dog lover.

Latest comments

  • Andy Beal
    June 10, 2010 at 7:00 pm

    Thanks for recommending Trackur! Not sure if you noticed, but we do also offer a completely free version. :-)

    Thanks also for reminding people that they shouldn’t set up their monitoring without first determining their objectives.

  • Mark Evans
    June 10, 2010 at 9:34 pm

    Another paid service to monitor social media buzz is Sysomos Heartbeat, which includes geo-demographics, automated sentiment, workflow management, the ability to identify and engage with key influencers, and integration with Salesforce.com. Here’s more information: http://bit.ly/nFOHD

    cheers, Mark

    Mark Evans
    Director of Communications
    Sysomos Inc.

  • Lauren Fernandez
    June 11, 2010 at 8:22 pm

    Hey Carley, thanks for mentioning Radian6.

    Social media monitoring tools are all about what fits the company vision and their brands – utilizing measurable objectives as foundation. It’s always good to know what different options are out there. If you have any questions about Radian6, please don’t hesitate to let me know!

    Best,

    Lauren Fernandez
    Community Manager, Radian6
    @cubanalaf