After writing my post yesterday on Local Search I got to thinking that there are some really great services out there that let you track what is being said on the Internet. While there are many services that charge big money for the privilege there are also a number free services which do a great job as well.
Below I have put together a list of what I believe to be the best of the best Internet monitoring tools, you can use these tools to keep track of your name, your brand, or even your competition.
First on the list is Google. Google is so much more than search these days you can videos, images and even access the seedy underbelly of the Internet; Newsgroups.
Google Alerts let you track what is being said online about you, your brand, and yes the competition. When you sign up for the service select daily, weekly or realtime updates and you’ll get an email whenever Google Alerts sees there has been new activity on your search phrase.
Google Trends: Knowing what people are searching for can be critical to identifying how to position your brand online with Google Trends you can get an idea of which keywords are most searched for. Even better you can narrow your research to specific cities.
Google Blog Search: Allows you to keep an on what is happening in the blogosphere. Even if a story does not make it into the main index of Google. Useful if you could not remember a particular blog that wrote an article that you wanted to reference this narrows your search to the blogosphere and it is also useful if you are tracking a mention of your name using Google Alerts.
Next up on the list are some tools aimed at social networks.
Technorati: This is one of the most useful tools out there for managing your reputation in social media sites. Technorati lets you set up custom RSS feeds to keep you informed when any blog mentions your company name.
Keotag.com: Lets you see who is using specific words as tags. This can be useful if you wanted to track a specific aspect of the market such as Subprime, Lending, Arizona or if you wanted to see the next time someone wrote about Lopsop Realty.
Blogpulse’s conversation tracker will enable you to track who’s linking to what on the Blogosphere including your company. Another good thing to know is what is the trend of the day or week Blogpulse trends lets you track whether a keyword is getting growing blog mentions or not. So next time someone says the blogosphere is a buzz with Second Life real estate you can tell them, it was in July not so much now.
Boardtracker.com: Blogs only reflect half of the conversations occuring online, Boardtracker.com will keep an eye on popular forums for you and alert you by RSS if you or your company is mentioned in a thread.
Yahoo Pipes: lets non developers quickly set up their own tools complete with filters. Ultimately if you can’t find what you looking for using the other tools or prefer the warm fuzzy of doing it yourself, Yahoo Pipes is the tool for the job.
Well that is all the tools I have for now. Is there any tools that you use to track information on the Internet? Or have you used any of these tools for other uses?
Mark Flavin
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