How does one go about setting up a combination of applications to cast a wide enough net across cyberspace to reel in the dynamic and ongoing buzz surrounding an organization?
Well, here's an outsider's perspective to this whole business of buzz monitoring...
After sieving through the advice given by Lorna Li (Jan 2008), Breakenridge (Mar 2009, personal communication), Andy Beal (@andybeal) and others, I've come to a conclusion that the common thread of advice among the practitioners is that to have a dynamic online monitoring system, one needs a combination of both active and passive search systems to effect a comprehensive sweep of the Web.
It really helps that many of these tools today have built-in features that allow breaking information to be channeled directly to our preferred RSS reader or straight into our designated email account. There are also features that increase the frequency of the reports from daily to hourly bulletins – which may them excellent platforms during crisis communication management when there needs to be a close scrutiny of the chatter on the web during the first few hours of a crisis situation.
Active Search Systems
BoardTracker, Google Alert and TweetBeep are examples of active search applications whereby subscribers will be automatically notified (either through email or RSS) about the latest search results pertaining to our query or topic of choice. With BoardTracker covering forum threads, Google Alert covering updates that appear in news, blogs, web pages updates, video and groups, and TweetBeep covering updates on Twitter, users of all three applications can be assured of a fairly comprehensive search of the Web across the most common social networking and UGC (User Generated Content) platforms.
Passive Search Systems
However, whereas the three applications listed above are acting as live sonar systems constantly ‘pinging’ away in the sea of information for keywords that match the rules we’ve set, there also a need to use other more manual systems like Twitter Search, Google Blog Search and Technorati (the latter two cover the blogosphere), which offers depth and historical span of research.
The six applications covered here are just some of the many platforms that practitioners may use in their buzz monitoring operations. The key principle is to always utilize a mashup of live systems at the front-end, backed up by additional tools that allow in-depth search when called for.
Most, if not all, of these have a free basic service that we can subscribe to and use at the cost of our time and effort. We'd be insane not to tap on such capabilities!