I’m a bit of a data nut, and I enjoy looking for new and interesting ways to find and visualize information. This is especially true for finding new ways to monitor the various conversations happening across social media web sites. There are new monitoring tools appearing every day, more than I could ever hope to have time to evaluate. I’ve written about monitoring solutions many times on this blog with posts about monitoring online conversations, monitoring dashboards, monitoring real-time information on Twitter, and more. I thought that it would be a good time for another post to highlight a few more tools for monitoring online conversations. I recently found Ken Burbary’s Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions, which has almost 100 social media monitoring tools listed, so I thought that I would evaluate a few of the solutions on his list to find a couple that provide interesting information. Most of the tools available do a pretty good job of finding the posts that match your search terms, so I focused on a couple of the solutions that provide some additional value or analysis of the results.
We recently made a couple of announcements about an upcoming event called Ignite Portland, so I decided to use it as my test case for these monitoring solutions. It’s a good test case because we’ve been doing the event for a couple of years, so it has plenty of history and the recent announcement generated some buzz this week, but the volume is fairly manageable. Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Tony Wright, founder and CEO of RescueTime, a venture-backed software startup that helps businesses and individuals improve their time management through automated time tracking and reporting.
A few weeks ago I read this very interesting piece on WebWorkerDaily about the impact of corporate blocking policies on web working employees. The gist of the article was that blocking tends to throw away a lot of the good with the bad and, increasingly, the things that managers think of as “bad” (Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.) are actually an important part of folks’ communication toolbox.
I’d like to pile on with more evidence that wholesale blocking is bad. The University of Melbourne found that workers who are allowed to surf the web for fun at work were actually nine percent more productive than those who weren’t. So what about monitoring? Well, it turns out that monitoring your employees (the way most employers do it) is similarly detrimental to productivity. It also tends to make life more stressful for employees.
At RescueTime, we are constantly thinking about the ethics and efficacy of blocking and monitoring for teams and individuals — it’s our mission to actually build software that does this in a way that increases productivity and isn’t evil. A huge, and sometimes daunting, part of our job as product developers is to educate employers on what works, what’s ethical and what kind of expectations are reasonable for web workers. Here’s some of what we’ve learned. Read the rest of this entry »
Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.
Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons
Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously. Read the rest of this entry »
In earlier posts, I provided some tips for improving your Twitter efficiency and mining Twitter for information. While both of these provide useful ways to utilize Twitter, you also need to be prepared to respond to other people quickly. Twitter is a short-attention-span medium, where tweets that are minutes old may already be obsolete. You don’t want to skip over any important information or miss the chance to respond. Here are my top three real-time monitoring tools for Twitter.
Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search
For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page. Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive. Read the rest of this entry »
Quite a few people seemed to enjoy last week’s post about How To Monitor Online Conversations, so I thought it would be a good idea to explain how to make a monitoring dashboard to make it easy to track what’s being said online about you, your company, your competitors and anything else you need to keep an eye on. The key to monitoring dashboards is to set them up in a way that you can check them frequently, quickly and easily.
When I talk about monitoring “dashboards,” I use the term very loosely. In some cases, I set clients up with RSS readers that have a typical dashboard look and feel for monitoring feeds, while in other cases the “dashboard” is really a monitoring section in an existing RSS reader with the feeds delivered as an OPML file.
In my experience, people who are new to RSS readers tend to do better with a reader that looks more like a dashboard than the a tree or folder structure. This is particularly true for monitoring because a dashboard lets you see more information at a glance. Netvibes and iGoogle are both good choices for new users. However, I think that the Netvibes layout tends to work slightly better for this purpose. Here’s an example of a monitoring dashboard built using Netvibes:
However, I personally use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. I have my monitoring dashboards set up in folders that don’t in any way resemble a typical dashboard. Try out a few different readers to find the one that works best for your style and usage. The tool that you select isn’t the critical element. The real magic is in the content that you are monitoring.
I monitor three primary types of content in my dashboards: vanity mentions, competition and industry analysis.
Vanity mentions are the conversations that people are having about you, your company, your products and your employees. Keep a close eye on these mentions so you can respond quickly to questions and concerns. A proactive approach to monitoring and responding to discussions can help you avoid potential issues before they get out of hand and can show people that you are responsive to your customers. I track vanity mentions for companies that I am involved with across Twitter, blog searches, Flickr, various video sites, FriendFeed and more.
You can get interesting insights about your competition and their activities by proactively monitoring their communications and what other people say about them online. I often monitor competitors blogs, press releases, support forums, job postings and personal blogs or social media accounts of key employees, in addition to monitoring mentions of the competition on various sources.
Industry analysis should also be part of your monitoring dashboard. Monitor blogs written by thought leaders within your industry along with tracking for mentions of keywords that are important to your organization or your interests. I often use this section of the monitoring dashboard as a way to find content for blog posts. It can be a great way to see what other people are talking about in your industry and give you an opportunity to respond to, disagree with or build on interesting ideas from other people.
In addition to the dashboard technology, I use tools like Yahoo Pipes and PostRank to help me find relevant content and filter it down to the pieces that are the most important for my purposes. If you have never used Yahoo Pipes, I have several two-minute Yahoo Pipes video demos that can help you learn what you need to get started.
How do you monitor online conversations? What kind of monitoring dashboards do you use?
Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. As a freelance consultant, I not only need to keep up with what people are saying about me and my company, but I also need to monitor the latest industry trends to learn new skills and stay relevant. While wearing my blogging hat, I also have to keep up with conversations that would be interesting to web workers for this blog, or relevant for people building online communities for my own blog.
Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
