Thankfully, online listening does not entail hourly searches on your favorite search engine to see what conversations are taking place online. There are many different tools that monitor the web, and supply the results via email alerts or RSS feeds or a web dashboard.
Google has several bespoke search services, and periodically adds more to the list. With the services below, an RSS feed is available for the search (Google Alerts sends weekly or daily emails with updates), so that all updates can be available through a feed reader.
• Google Alerts: www.google.com/alerts. Google Alerts will send an email when the keyword is used in either a credible news item or a blog post.
• Google News: news.google.com. Google News searches all news items for mentions of a keyword.
• Google Blog Search: blogsearch.google.com. Google Blog Search searches all blog posts for mentions of a keyword.
• Google Patent Search: www.google.com/patents. Google Patent Search allows you to keep track of all filings related to an industry, and searches can be done to see if there are patent filings which might infringe on other patents.
• Google Video Search: www.google.com/videohp. Video search relies on the data that have been added to describe a video, and will return results based on keyword matches.
There are several search engines that focus solely on tracking blogs, news and other social media, and can provide trends for searches. As well as providing regular updates of new postings, these search engines can also provide an overview over a certain period of time.
• Technorati: www.technorati.com. Technorati tracks blogs and tagged social media.
• Socialbakers: www.socialbakers.com. Socialbakers provides a series of social media listening options.
• Flickr: www.flickr.com/search. RSS updates for searches on a particular keyword will reveal when a brand name has been used in tagging a photo.
• Delicious: delicious.com. An RSS feed can be created for URLs tagged with keywords, or for new bookmarking of a URL.
In addition to these mostly free tools, there are also a number of premium paid tools available to make the process easier and more robust. See the section on Tools of the trade for more suggestions.
Listening is the first step to getting involved in the conversation surrounding a company. Using search tools and RSS feeds means that information can be accessed quickly and in one place, without the need to visit hundreds of websites.
Social media engagement is often the next step in keeping these customers engaged.
