Tools used to track brand buzz
Has your brand jumped into the social media scene? If yes, that’s great. If no, that’s semi-ok, but be aware of the conversations people are having about you. Knowing the associations and relationships your brand has online is a great start.
It’s the best feedback you’ll ever get, better than any consumer research you’ll ever buy. Whether it’s someone sharing photos on Flickr or personal thoughts on Facebook, every mention of your brand online has importance. Not only will following all this stuff keep you on the offensive, but it will have you prepared for the defensive as well (Dominos anyone?).
So finally, to the juicy stuff. Here are some tools that will help you monitor your brand’s presence online. There are many established buzz trackers and new ones coming out every few months, so this is just a small list of tools we think are quick and simple.
Yahoo and Google Alerts are essential, if you aren’t doing it, then go do it now. Go to www.google.com/alerts, enter your keyword, select a couple options and you’ll be notified whenever there are relevant Google results.
An RSS feed is the basic aggregator. Here is a good list some of the top aggregators, http://tinyurl.com/5acck8, but there are so many it will make your head spin. YahooPipes is a great aggregator that’s highly customizable and fun to use. They’re all customizable with filter features so you can receive only the stuff you are interested in.
This is a type of news aggregator, but perfect for Moosylvanians and other creative junkies. There is doodling involved, hence the name. Just try it for yourself.
SocialMention.com will instantly show you what people are saying about your brand in real-time. It’s a continuous update of your brand’s reputation. The search results are aggregated from top social media outlets – Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Google blog search, etc. – and then presented to you in a nice, neat package.
You will also get the brand’s social rank, related keywords and an outline of where the information came from. You can even get your own customized RSS feed and email alerts.
Discover what people are saying about a brand on Twitter and see a calendar of the activity, just simply search for the brand or important keywords.
eyePlorer just launched in February and is still in baby beta stage. It’s an information engine that will visualize facts for a word (brand) and also the relationship between those facts. Just visit eyePlorer and type in a brand name that interests you. You’ll instantly find the most relevant associations with that brand, all nicely categorized and customizable in an eyeMap.
As of now, eyePlorer is simply pulling information from U.S. & German Wikipedia. But undoubtedly, the developers are working on pulling information from other major web outlets: google, twitter, facebook, youtube, etc, which would be great. We would be able to find out a brand’s most relevant and important associations a brand has online instantly and free.
This list could keep going on and on, so here is a list of other great tools that you should be using: