There are a lot of great tools out there to monitor the conversation about you, and there are several vendors who specialize in monitoring that can be great partners and integral components to your social media efforts. But if you’re just getting started or are curious about monitoring the conversation going on about you, you can get going without any money.
What to do:
- Use free monitoring. Google’s blog search () is a powerful tool to track blog conversations and allows you to set up alerts to notify you anytime you’re mentioned.
- Use your team. Assign different staff members to monitor key forums, blogs or Web sites that discuss you or your industry.
- Reexamine existing data. Odds are, the answers to your order form’s “How did you hear about us?” can point you to a lot of the sources of conversation about your brand.
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
Hi Andy,
Indeed listening is important! Monitoring Google Alerts is the first place to start, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. You're going to want to monitor everything from Twitter, to message boards, to wiki's & mainstream media.
We have the Freemium version of Techrigy SM2 that monitors across all those platforms & helps you get started for free – http://sm2.techrigy.com
I'd be glad to do a guest post on the analysis of the info & steps forward.
Connie
Techrigy Community Strategist
Yes. This is a great start. Sometimes, though, it would be nice if Twitter would just output the query count on http://search.twitter.com so we can get a feel for the number of mentions without having to write a script to figure it out.