Five Tools I Use for Listening

June 15, 2008 · Comments

dog ears As part of the social media strategy series, I thought I’d start with listening.

Social media tools are a great way to get the word out about your passions, your interests, the company’s latest products, but we tend to rush right into the “speaking” side of the toolbox without giving much thought to the “listening” part. Knowing what people are saying about you, your competitors, and your industry as a whole are just as important as blogging and making good video.

It’s interesting to note that companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to move their capabilities to understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks.

As part of our social media strategy, let’s presume that all businesses will need a way of listening to their audience, their customers, their partners, and their detractors. Let’s start with the tools, and we will talk about the strategy for dealing with what we hear in a subsequent post. By the way, the guts and tech behind most every one of these tools is RSS. Click that link to watch a quick YouTube video by Common Craft, if you want a refresher on what RSS is/does.

Five Tools I Use for Listening

  • Google Reader – I use Google Reader as my home base for collecting and reading all the various sources of information I collect. It’s web-based, fast, and easy to use. It allows me to blaze through content without thinking much about it. Use Google Reader by adding various searches to it (described in the next few bullets).
  • Technorati – Go to Technorati, put your company ( product, brand, personal) name into the search bar, and see what people are saying about you. Note the little orange RSS subscription button in the upper right. Copy that link location (Right click the link and say “Copy Link” or however your browser words that). Now, dump that into Google Reader as one of your listening searches. Repeat this for your competitor’s name, brand, individuals, and some industry terms (if you can make them succinct).
  • Google Blogsearch – Go to Google Blogsearch and do the same thing. Sure there will be some overlap, but it’s important to capture both. The subscription to searches link is on the left hand side about 1/3 down the page.
  • Summize – If you’re thinking about using social networks and social media, it’s likely that some of your customers are using Twitter. If so, go to Summize and put in your search terms there, too. Cook as many searches as you need, grabbing the RSS feeds and throwing them into Google Reader. Build a strong catalog of searches, and then remove bad or ineffective ones after you trial them out a bit.
  • Link Checker – Here’s an off-the-beaten path one. Go to SEO Pro and use their free link checker. (Note: it’s a bit slow to crawl for technical reasons, so don’t get worried if it takes a while to respond to your query). This tool checks who’s linking to your URLs, what the link text is (what’s in blue on the web page that people might click to get to you), and all kinds of stats that matter to search engine optimization experts, but might not matter to you. Why? Because it’s important to know what people are saying about you with their linking efforts.
  • BONUS ROUND: Crazy Egg – If you want to see how people are looking at your website when they’re NOT commenting and talking about you, try out Crazy Egg. The tool is chock full of visualization data, including heat maps, that show you how people are interacting with your website. Sometimes, people aren’t saying something on your blog posts because they’re being distracted by something else. Here’s your chance to figure that out.

The Pro Stuff

If you want something a little more advanced than hacking search tools and sucking the RSS feeds into readers (which isn’t that bad, you know), you might try tools like Radian6 (note: I just completed a 3 part webinar series with them that we’re airing soon. Go to Twebinar.com for details) or BuzzLogic or a series of other tools in the same category (they’re all listening, so I’m sure they can swarm here and give links in the comments section).

There are values to the professional products, and if you’re a larger company and can afford the not-too-very-expensive splurge, you get a lot more dashboarding and reporting with such tools. But if you’re bootstrapping, stick with me, kids.

How are You Listening?

I’m curious to know who’s doing what in the world of listening. Are you doing something formal with your organization? Have you tried any of these tools for this purpose? What else might we be missing in our tool set?

Photo credit, tanakawho

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  • "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.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • Not as a result of reading this post, you understand. Coincidentally, earlier today.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
    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.
  • Plus of course Google Alerts for instant notification of when me or my company is mentioned online!
  • 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...
  • 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/
  • I've put up searches (and feeds) in Twingly and Friendfeed as well.
  • John
    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.
  • 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
  • Thanks for the awesome post and blog! I have really enjoyed your blog since I found it via lifehacker a few months ago.
    Brad
  • 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.
  • 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...
  • Hey! Link Checker is now a very cool addition to my toolbox :-)

    Thanks Chris!
  • Bob Potter
    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
    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.)
  • @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.
  • just came across this again in my delicious bookmarks and wanted to thank you for this info...still relevant a year later
  • Using Google Reader and Blogsearch personally but our firm is a Radian6 customer which we use for brand management on behalf of our clients (who source their customer care to us).
  • mbt1451
    That’s something,That's what I was thinking.Brilliant idea.
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