The Blog Medic

Whether it’s your own business endeavour or you’re writing for a corporate blog, you’ll want to track who’s talking about you and what they’re saying. Traditionally, PR agencies would put together daily all the press cuttings for a company and send them through.

When the boss said “let’s launch a blog”, he might not have allocated the budget to do this large-scale tracking, but will expect you to circulate some metrics and reports on the buzz you’re creating. Thankfully, the Internet is full of useful and free resources.

Find the buzz

What are people saying? What low-effort, automated ways are there to track the buzz? Keeping in mind the limited amount of time you’ll want to dedicate to analysis (you want to spend your time writing, don’t you?), there are great ways to automate or simplify the research.

• Google Alerts: Setup Google Alerts with your company name, your competitors’ names and some industry keywords. You’ll get reporting from news, blogs, videos and pretty much everything Google indexes. Get it as an email or RSS feed* on a daily basis.
• Twitter tracking: If your users are likely to be active on Twitter, you might want to track a few keywords relating to your brand.
• Yahoo Answers: Do a first search for your company name (For example, Priceline) and click the orange RSS icon in the address bar to start tracking it. This feed will bring up any mention of your search term - it may also pick up some irrelevant flotsam along the way if your brand name is something too common.
• Google Analytics: I think you should be using Google Analytics for a number of reasons (which I’ll reserve for a later post, alongside a review of multiple other free stats packages), but amongst them lies a priceless tool - Referring sources. Find out who is linking to you and how much traffic they’re sending you. It’s often a good way to quantify how much visibility the author of the praising or criticising article gets.
• Del.icio.us bookmarking: Visit Del.icio.us and search for related keywords. Look at which posts have been most bookmarked by readers, it may hint at what kind of content they find most useful.

[* Not clear on what an RSS feed is? No shame in asking! Back in Skinny Jeans has one of my favourite simple explanations of all times.]

Share the buzz

Now that you’ve found out what’s going on, there are ways to share the information (aside from the dreaded weekly spreadsheet) which your colleagues may find refreshing.

• Del.icio.us (yes, again!): Create an account and aggregate your findings by bookmarking their URLs (The Firefox toolbar plugin makes it so easy) and sharing either all the bookmarks, or simply those tagged with a specific word. For example, if I worked for Campaign Monitor, I could share http://del.icio.us/thatcanadiangirl/campaignmonitor with the team, having tagged all relevant news with “campaignmonitor”. [Bonus points: Integrate the feed to your blog as Twitter have done on theirs to share the buzz with your readers.]
• Google Reader: If your colleagues are somewhat technically inclined, they may be using RSS readers already. If that’s the case, exploit the “Shared items” feeds in Google Reader to instantly distribute useful links. Danny Sullivan has a great explanation of Google’s “Shared items” feature and how to use it.
• Twitterfeed: Want to communicate your findings with your Twitter followers as well? Plug the RSS feed of your choice into Twitter with Twitterfeed. A word of warning, be sure to balance it out with non-automated genuine conversation or you’ll annoy your readership.
• Internal wiki: I’m personally not a big fan of wikis because they take active attention to remain up to date, but if multiple people are likely to report on links they found, it can be a good solution, enabling anyone in the team to modify a given page where all useful links are saved. Wikimedia is an example of a self-hosted wiki you could use.
• Google Docs: I hear you say “enough with the Google love already!” but just one more. Google Documents, provided your colleagues also have a Google account, also allows multiple users to update and edit the same document, whether it’s a text file, spreadsheet or slide presentation.

All of the above are free tools, which should help when you’re working on a tiny or non-existing budget but need to quantify and qualify the buzz to support your reporting to your boss and your colleagues.

Tags: blogging, Corporate blogging, del.icio.us, google alerts, google analytics, google docs, google reader, marketing, media, mediawiki, public relations, rss, twitter, twitterfeed, wiki, yahoo answers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.