Public Relations and Communications Professionals face a “monitoring” problem every day. How do you find valuable content that is relevant to your firm or client without wasting hours each day? Especially if you need results from social media as well as traditional media outlets, and especially if you don’t want to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for paid monitoring solutions. After speaking with dozens of firms, here’s the free tools that people are using:
- Google Alerts: This ubiqutous tool is hardly new or novel, but it’s a staple in any self respecting professionals toolbelt. Establish up to 1000 different alerts using search terms and Google will email you any time they find a mention of your keywords. This should be considered a bare minimum for those of you establishing a monitoring presence.
- Yahoo Alerts: Pretty much the same thing as Google Alerts, but just a different source. The two will often find the same results, but sometimes one will pick up a mention that the other one doesn’t catch. Not a necessary tool, but it certainly can’t hurt!
- Social Mention: This company bills themselves as Google Alerts for social media. They also provide very interesting stats as far as comment sentiment, keywords, sources, etc. Definitely check them out, it will change the way you think about reporting to your clients.
- Zuula Search: Zuula is a search engine aggregator. Type in any search term and Zuula will search 9 different providers, including blog searches and various news searches.
- Twitter: This is an absolute must for anyone interested in “real time search”. Instantly see what people are saying about you right now and how they look at your company or clients.
- Addictomatic: Another aggregator, but with results presented in a very visually appealing way. Addictomatic is a good way to get a quick overall picture of the brands you are interested in.
- Google News: Some of the best up to date news searches out there. You can get these results in the aggregators I’ve talked about, but if you only care about using a few different sources, definitely add G News to your arsenal.
- Google Blog Search: Should be fairly explanatory, but Google filters through the blogosphere to find your search terms. A good basic tool to have.
- Technorati: the original blog search, which currently has indexed tens of millions of different blogs. These results are also available in the aggregators I’ve talked about.
Are there other monitoring tools out there? What did I miss? In future installments, I’d like to talk about how communications firms keep track of all of these searches. Email aking [at] webnotes.net if you have a unique way of doing this!
[image courtesy of chrisjohnbeckett]
