Collective Thoughts

Catch a buzz with Whos Talkin

Last fall a fellow by the name of Joe Hall got in touch with a new toy he was working on in hopes of getting some insight. Seems he wanted some insight from the tool’s perspective, being a Grade A tool myself, his reasoning seemed sound. I figured that was surly the reason as my social chops are, well… less than enviable.

Either way, I’m always up fer playing with shiney new things and if someone wants to listen to my rambling, that’s an issue for their therapist.

If we know one thing my friends, as well as we do any, there are waaaay too many tools out there. Whos Talkin falls into the void of catch phrase greatness, buzz monitoring. As regular readers may remember, we looked at Google Custom Search Engines and other buzz tools for blog posting, not so long ago. Avid search geeks just have a thing for information discovery, indexing and retrieval.. so it’s natural.

What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening?

For all you information magnets and buzz stalkers… I say, give Whos Talkin’ a try. It looks like a pretty good tool that has a future. When asked, some of my other mates gave it a go and agreed that WT does seem to find mentions that other locales (Technorati, Google Blog Search and their ilk) weren’t finding. Add to that the handy segmentation and it’s definitely worth keeping in the tool box.

Lay of the Land

OK… give you a quick look and then you might as well head over and give it a go for yourself…. Simply start off at the clean (Googlish?) home page; put in the term you want to check on (can be anything from topics, names, places, researching blog posts). From there you are presented with the results, in a nice simple interface. For me the text is a tad large, so CTRL- sorts that for me…  

Anyways…I searched the drama du jour …

What is quite handy are the titles in the side panel, these are for segmenting the results. These options include;

1. Blogs
2. News
3. Networks
4. Videos
5. Images
6. Forums
7. Tags

We can get as granular as you like depending on what you’re looking to do. I find that pretty hand as in the past I cobbled a variety of Google Custom Search Engine’s together to get the job done as I did with Search SEO Pros and Research your blog posts with buzz monitors.

The major teaser at this point of course is hitting the ‘Options’ tab where we’re told some great features are on the way such as saving searches, RSS and even an API (which had a few trail riders drooling). While it is good as is, many of the people that tried it out were asking about the upcoming additions. Thus being and SEO geek, searching out the buzz man was the next call of order…

In talking with Joe it seems apparent the early reactions have done well, “…(the) first week after launch we had a little over 20,000 unique visitors” which is not a bad start, although he followed up with near irony, saying, “…..it does slow down when the buzz wears off” – he oughta know I’d imagine.

Features and the Future

While the final plans aren’t in place, they are looking to start rolling out a pro version soon;

“I am thinking like one package that can do everything you need, and then in the future expand into more packages that folks that are more serious about monitoring might want.” Joe said, while venturing that Pro accounts could have;

1. Saved Searches,
2. RSS,
3. Email Alerts
4. Trending data.

 Beyond that, as with any good social tool they’re considering an API among other things. You’d have to think there is potential for even a white label version, but I’m wandering now.

iGoogle gadget

He’s even whipped up an iGoogle gadget, which I promptly whacked onto one of my many tabs;

What can I say? That’s just toooo much fun. As you can see I have a few buzz tracking toys on the go there. Having Who’s Talkin right in my Google Homepage was a definite bonus.

Link checking

Another bonus is that you can also use the ‘link:’ command to find websites/blogs that have linked to you in a given article – an added layer of digging that works as well… Here’s a video on that;

And there are a few more videos HERE…

WhosTalking certainly has some potential. Where it goes from here is about as easy as predicting when this damned snow will melt away upon my Canadian doorstep. I can tell you that the tool has some handy applications and the team seem committed to growing it even further – a great job for a small shop ( one simply has to root for the underdog oui?) I want to thank Joe for asking me along and for answering questions… and I wish him only the best for the future.

I shall report back when the next changes come out… until then, get yer buzz on

Posted in Buzz monitoring | 5 Comments »

Research your posts with Buzz Monitoring

I was playing with some toys earlier and thought; why don’t we look a little deeper into the world of Buzz Monitoring. And I don’t mean for tracking buzz altogether either. What about utilizing it when crafting new content or blog posts? Buzz monitoring need not be a glorified vanity search endeavour when it can unlock a genie of information to bring life to your content generation efforts.

While you can certainly use a buzz monitoring program to track activity relating to ones blog or company metrics, it can be also used to track/research just about anything. You can use it to track news on markets for projects and can suggest the latest trends and/or buzz for content creation programs and general business intelligence.

Information is the currency of content

What is most certainly a great way to leverage them is when used for researching your next blog post. It is not only a good way to find nuggets of varied perspectives, but also shows you the latest discussions that are going on in a given topic area.

This can be important as you can continue existing discussions in either a supportive or converse perspective and hopefully catch any existing momentum that already exists in the marketplace. You may even find the research into the most recent activity begins to craft your post in directions you may not have started off on in the fist place.

Some tools to play with

As it has been said by the ever fascinating Johnny Long; Google is your friend – so let’s start there.

(Johnny Long… Not related.. but entertaining)

Anyway, let’s continue on… Often freshness matters as much as quality and other times aged, respected feed sources are the call of the day. In the former, where freshness plays a roll, try a quick run though various searches on Google;

Google Blog Search; which can be set to various time frames – you can also grab a widget for your iGoogle or set up alerts for desired topics.

Google Search (regular); using time delineated results (1 week here) – a variety of Google search hacks are always handy for researching anything. But that’s another story.

Other useful blog stops include;

Now this method works on a larger scale but also tend to have a higher noise-to signal ratio than one may want when creating content. Timely content isn’t always the best content. One of the next options is to do a little Google personalization in the form of known, respected sources….

PostRank (consolidate with Aiderss) – another handy buzz monitor tool is PostRank which will scan a feed and give you a 1-10 scale of each post. This can be handy when analyzing a given post or topic type to ensure you have the best possible chance of creating a popular post of your own.

Do-it-yourself

The Google Custom Search Engine; a service that allows you to search only the sites you wish and even segment them. I like creating GCSEs centric to areas of study. In my case that would be search engines, search marketing and social media marketing. To that end I created a couple engines to study what I felt were some of the more authoritative barometers of the genre

The SEO Search Engine – which we can search ‘buzz monitor’ to get results on the topic from top SEO blogs.

The SMM Search – which contains many of the top social media marketing blogs and we’d get this for ‘buzz monitor’

What is advantageous to making a custom search engine is controlling the source material. Even if you are writing for a niche you’re not familiar with, once populating with known entities in the space it is your crystal ball to mining content ideas and opinions.

Should we be tasked with creating content for a fishing store/blog you would not only mine the client and his suppliers for leads (on influencer sites/blogs) but head off to locales such as Technorati , Alltop or MBL – to get a good cross section and identify influencers.

Add them into your custom search engine and away you go…

Regardless of how you populate them, utilizing a Google Custom Search Engine can make for a great signal to noise tool for ongoing project needs. Segmentation helps to narrow the focus where that is often needed to catch the influencers in a market segment.

Segmenting the social world

Next we want to be able to JUST search the social world for activity. Once more utilizing the GCSE we can segment the various social sites not only choosing which to include, but also segment by basic type (social media, networking, bookmarking etc…). To that end;

Social Activity Search – which enables searching of the various major social sites like so..

Twitter/FriendFeed/Plurk Search – for watching the world of micro-bloggers – our search

The main point being to load them up with sites you feel you are targeting or interested in for a given campaign. It takes very little time but gives you a tool at your control that makes getting the feel for a buzz in a given niche easy and accessible.

If you’re looking for a good list of sites to mine for data, I just happen to keep a list here which might come in handy. You can even go old school and make one to search the forums in a given niche – you’re limited by your imagination and uses for qualitative as well as quantitative data.

Also, if you want to track buzz on Twitter, use the real-time search – which we can use with topic markers (#seo for example) or use the advanced search goodies which are here – of interest is the ‘sentiment’ search which can help if you’re after a positive or negative spin on your post.

What to make of it all?

Now that you have all this information it is a matter of mining it for data.

Start by making note of;

1. Common topics; old staples that are the everyday
2. Popular topics; ones that are hot on social sites
3. Controversial Topics; those that raise the emotions
4. Timely items; news that is bandwagon friendly
5. Resource lists; topically relevant tools and resources.
6. Popular sites; top influencers often cited (show some link love)
7. Chronological anomalies (is more content published on a certain day?)

This can be a scientific excursion utilizing a spreadsheet or other application or a more informal process of making notes of the areas that stand out to you. What is more important is that you get a feel for the target audience and the market itself before even setting about the content creation itself. You may already have a topic in mind, you may not; the goal is to understand the space.

Then Target your approach; using traditional hooks;

1. The News hook
2. Resource angle
3. Freebies and give-a-ways
4. The passion poker
5. The Ego baiter

Armed with your research it should be easy to find topics, resources and influencers to match up with more traditional link bait approaches to make a compelling page/blog post. Once more we are merely looking to get the creative juices flowing through this process. Beyond buzz monitoring there are other factors such as past analytics and openly available trend data from locales such as Google Trends and Compete from which we can draw from. Utilizing buzz monitoring is merely another tool in deciding on the ultimate direction of any content creation plan.

 
Just links in the chain

There are many other considerations to be had when putting together a content creation plan – but buzz monitoring is certainly a tool with many uses. Hopefully turning to these tools for more than mere engagement metrics and benchmarks will enhance your own imagination to how these tools can be used. If you approach them as a blank canvass awaiting the first stroke, you will find much value to be had beyond traditional uses. Next time your writing or seeking inspiration why not give it a try ;0)

And because we’ve merely opened a new door into Buzz Monitoring; What else can they do? Research and Development? Business intelligence? Qualitative data?

There is more here than a mere vanity search nor fickle engagement metrics – get creative

Here are some goodies that came out of this expedition for more of your creative endeavours;

Finding were your customers are talking about you. – Vanessa Fox
13 Tools for Tracking discussions in the Blog-o-sphere - Mashable
26 Free Social Media Tracking Tools – Marketing Pilgrim
Reputation Management made easy, and Free! – Search Engine Land
Tools to monitor your brand effectively – Social Media Trader
Top 10 reasons to monitor your brand online – TopRank Blog

Other toys for tracking

Megite – social news aggregrator for uncovering the most relevant items from auto-discovered news sites and weblogs. Here’s an example using Lee Odden’s Big list of marketing blogs.

Zemanta – Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta; it then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.

Paid Services – I haven’t had the opportunity to review these, use at own risk.

Trackur
SentiMetrics
CyberAlert - NetPinions
Umbria
Buzz Logic
Nielsen Buzz Metrics
ScoutLabs

Posted in Productivity, Tips & Tricks | 8 Comments »