How to setup a free brand monitoring program
What is Brand Monitoring?
The proliferation of easy-to-use tools in the social web has empowered anyone, with an Internet connection, to participate in a social dialogue and share their opinion about a topic, person or brand. These social dialogues, which are typically spread across a vast web of disparate systems and platforms, can provide consumer insight and market intelligence, as well as enable organizations to proactively identify and address issues as they arise. All that is required to reap the benefits is a plan for gathering social dialogues relevant to your brand. This gathering of relevant social dialogues is called Brand Monitoring. However, due to the sheer number of social dialogues and locations that these dialogues happen, it’s not feasible to monitor them without leveraging technology.
There are a variety of commercial platforms, which have been developed specifically for the purpose of brand monitoring. Platforms like Radian6 (my favorite) consume large amounts of data and through keyword filtering, expose conversations relevant to you and your brand. However, these platforms are not free. In this blog post, I’m going to so you how to setup a basic brand monitoring program using freely available tools and platforms. This is a great starting point for anyone who is diving into social media, that doesn’t yet have the budget to engage a company like Radian6.
More often than not, content in the social web is available for syndication via RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds; making the information portable to multiple platforms (ex. laptops, mobile devices, etc.), easy to broadcast and also easy to find. There are a variety of publicly accessible “social search engines” that scour the social web and index the content they find. These “social search engines” are the tools which we will leverage to create a free, yet very effective brand monitoring program.
How to build a Successful and Free Brand Monitoring Program
Below I’ve included a video tutorial produced by MindComet new media rockstar, Art Wilbur. To follow along, you’re going to need a couple of things.
Access to an RSS reader, if you don’t already have one. I prefer Google Reader and will be using it for this tutorial. It’s simple to use and has a number of impressive features.
Access to Google Docs. Just any old spreadsheet software won’t work. As part of this tutorial, we’ve provided you with a pre-canned spreadsheet (via Google Docs) for use in implementing your own brand monitoring program.
Other tools referenced include FeedShow OPML Builder, Google Alerts, Gowalla RSS Tool.
Brand Monitoring with Free Tools from MindComet.
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 30, 2010