If Youre New Here
Today was a good day for me. If you’re new here, thanks for stopping by. I’ve got lots of stuff to read. Years of it. If you want a quick cheat sheet, here’s the rest of the Social Media 100 series to date. If you want to get the new stuff, please consider subscribing for free to get the posts sent to your reader of choice.
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I’m glad you’re here, and thanks for your support. The people who comment and spend time at [chrisbrogan.com] are some of the best, most engaged people in social media that you’ll meet on your journey. Believe me, the folks leaving comments could give keynotes on social media and hold there own (heck, some do!).
Thank you. I’m so glad you’ve given me your time and attention. More to come.
Photo credit, alosh bennett
Five Tools I Use for Listening
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
ReadBurner Partners with NetVibes
Why let Google Reader have all the fun? My friend, Drew Olanoff, alerts me to the news that ReadBurner, known for showing news from the point of view of how many people have shared it using Google Reader’s Shared Items feature, have expanded. They’ve just released (20 minutes ago) a tie into NetVibes via the Ginger API, that will promote a similar kind of feature. The tab is already live on the ReadBurner site, so you can test it out directly.
As the aggregation space heats up, I’m excited that Drew, Adam, and the rest of the team are coming up with interesting new ideas at ReadBurner, and I wish them well.
What do you think? And who’s going to come out with smart filtering first?
Screen caps made with Skitch
Alltop- Encouraging the Mainstream
I’ve been thinking about Alltop. It’s a site built by Guy Kawasaki to help people find popular blogs on various topics. My blog and Twitter account show up in a few of these categories (thanks, Guy!), but what I’m interested in talking about are the topics that might appeal to the mainstream, and why I think Alltop deserves a little love.
What Is It
Alltop is an Internet magazine rack, fed by blogs. It is a site that aggregates summary content from multiple blogs into categories of interest. The source blogs feed information into Alltop by way of their RSS feed, but all of this plumbing is hidden away under the covers so that Alltop users don’t have to think about it.
Who Uses It
Alltop isn’t for you or me. It’s for friends and family and coworkers who aren’t yet surfing at the speed of light with Google Reader, or adding meta commentary via FriendFeed. It’s for our neighbor who still logs into AOL, or people who want to read a sampling of information without a lot of customization.
Why Should You Care
First, check out the various categories at Alltop. Is your blog a great representative of one of the categories? You might contact Guy and ask to be listed in that category. Second, this is another way to get people comfortable with using blogs as sources of information. Remember, you and I are IN this world. We forget that others still question the credibility of blogs.
What Comes Next
One of two things might come next to Alltop: advertising, or acquisition. If I’m Guy, I’m hoping more for B than A, but hey, if it pays for summer gas money, great. For the rest of us, it’s something to watch, as ANY opportunity to get the mainstream into our world is a good thing. YouTube and Hulu aren’t immediately the best thing for independent video producers, but the more people get used to watching content online, the more likely they are not to discriminate and try out new, independent products. Alltop works like that, in my estimation.
What’s Your Take
Have you looked at the various categories served in Alltop? Have you seen the representative blogs? What do you think?
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–Chris…
Two More Ways to Share This Blog
Thank you to Fred Wilson for turning me on to the really cool product, Eco-Safe. It’s a way to save an entire post to PDF, email it to a friend, etc. How cool is that? Save paper: use a PDF. The widget is now in the right-hand sidebar. It looks JUST like this:
Also, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t added back in the “subscribe to the blog via your email” option for this site. I’ve added it to the top right sidebar for you. It looks like this:
Share. That’s why I do it.
The Web Version of You
What FriendFeed gives us here is a sense of how the web might see you (and I also mean “your business”). I don’t mean search. I mean the nature of the things you create. This list of places where you make media in different forms becomes the sum of your output, what you create. Your bitprint (like a footprint, but in digital).
What do you see there? What’s missing? Once we all have aggregated, what comes next?
We Still Need Better Filters
With billions of blogs and hundreds of thousands of podcasts and with Flickr and with site after site after site worth of data to consume, we have the “get it to my desk or phone” part of the problem fairly well managed. With services like Google Reader and Friend Feed, and del.icio.us to a lesser extent, we’re starting to find ways to collect all this information in one place (or a few places).
But what’s missing are filters. Twitter has no filtering mechanism, nor even a “bubble up the good stuff” mechanism. Google Reader lets friends share what they think are good blog posts, but obviously this works out that what YOU think is a good post and what I think is a good post might not always match up. There needs to be another layer of filtering such that I can choose to read your promoted posts, but I should then get the opportunity to bubble my best (and by “best,” I mean most closely informationally aligned) sharing sources to the top of the heap.
It’s all still too linear. Too boolean.
Who’s making the right kinds of filters to promote the best stuff? Who’s helping us suppress the drivel?
How would YOU like to see filters work?
Subscription Drive
You’re great people. I love that you come here and participate with me on [chrisbrogan.com]. I’m especially grateful for the conversations we have in the comments section. This just makes me thrilled to bits.
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If you’re visiting the website directly, would you consider also subscribing for free to get this delivered to your feed reader of choice?
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What I’d really love to do is ask you to invite folks you know who maybe would find this information useful, because then we’d have some other points of view on these things.
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Thanks! Truly.
Comments and Why RSS Is Not Enough
Hopefully, someone amazing like Dave Winer will come along and explain to me(us) where this is going.
I dipped into a TechCrunch post to see what people had to say about a recent post, and realized that the comments there are just as important as the posts most time. Sounds like how I feel about here, right?
My thought is that RSS as a communications medium, while being wholly responsible for all the good and wonderful and magical things that have come to the web over the last 5 or 6 years, might need an upgrade. Why? Because I want the comment flow. I want to be part of the back and forth of the conversation under the hood.
Yes, I understand that some blogging platforms have a separate RSS feed for comments, but is that the right solution to the problem? I don’t think so. I think it has to be something more robust, and maybe with a toggle.
What’s your take? Just as I’m telling people to use RSS readers to absorb their blogs and podcasts and the like, I’m thinking that the experience of the original site, especially in the comments department, is important to the larger media picture. True? Wrong?
(Think of this as a thought in process that I hope others will improve with their own opinions).
Pictures uploaded with plasq’s Skitch.
