Category — Research Tools

William S. Burroughs once wrote “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts”. However, in today’s world of social media, networking, and blogging, tracking the facts behind what is being said about you, your company, or your website is not just about being a little paranoid, it can also make good business and personal sense as well.

Using two free services, Google Alerts and Technorati Watchlists, you can develop an automated system to easily manage what’s being said about you, your blog, or your company site with minimal effort.

1.) If you haven’t registered yet with Technorati or claimed a blog, simply navigate to the main page and click on the word “Join” and fill out the brief form.

2.) Once you have an account, navigate to the Watchlist feature on Technorati (it’s hard to find if you don’t search for it) and add the following items to the “Add to Your Watchlist” box.

• The URL of your website
• The name of your website in quotes (e.g., “Insight Buzz”)
• Your name or online nickname in quotes. Add any derivation of your name that you may use online.
• Any company or brand name you want to track as well

3.) Once you have Watchlists that are tracking what you want them to, subscribe to them by clicking the orange RSS buttons.

4.) If you manage your feeds with Google Reader, put all your Watchlist feeds into a single folder. For more tips on managing feeds with Google Reader, you can check out my previous post on 10 Steps To Mastering Google Reader.

5.) Since Technorati is mostly focused on blogs, you will also want to set up some Google Alerts to cover mentions that happen in the broader Internet universe in areas like news or videos. The first step is to access the Google Alerts site.

6.) The nice thing about Google Alerts is that you don’t have to have a Google account. Having an account is useful, though, in managing a large number of alerts.

7.) You can then add the same info as you did for the Technorati Watchlists. If you’re worried about spam blogs scraping your website content, you can even add the following combinations, as suggested by RT Cunningham at Untwisted Vortex.

• link:http://yourwebsite.com
• link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
• Your Website
• YourWebsite
• yourwebsite.com
• www.yourwebsite.com

8.) I’d generally use the comprehensive setting with Google Alerts and set the alert timing to once a day.

9.) Oddly, Google Alerts only sends your alerts to an e-mail address, without an RSS option like Technorati (maybe that’s why it’s still called Beta). You can have all your alerts filtered into a e-mail folder, however, much like you can with Google Reader.

10.) With your online reputation now being automatically monitored, make sure you make adjustments as necessary to ensure you have the right search terms, especially if your terms are bringing in a lot of non-relevant hits.

For those who want to explore an even broader range of available reputation tracking services, Social Media Trader recently provided a wide list of applications that can track everything from keyword trends and comments, as well as conversations that take place on forums that Google doesn’t index.

• Germans tend to comment more on social media than participants in other EU countries, but not half as much as those in urban China.
• People in the UK are not as big on tagging or using RSS feeds as others, but they lead Europe in social network participation.

These were just some of the factoids I uncovered while having some fun over the weekend playing around with this social media segmentation tool from Forrester Research (I’ll be the first one to admit that only someone who works in market research would call playing with social media segmentation tools a form of fun).

Thanks to the blog mentions by Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li at Forrester Research, I found the application, along with its corresponding social media segmentation.

The tool looks at broad groups of internet users and classifies them into segments based upon their level of social media participation. This chart shows the different groups and their definitions (click for a larger image):

My only quibble with the segmentation is that I believe there is a lot more granularity out there for Creators (e.g., I’d imagine there could be some significant differences between those who strictly blog versus heavy YouTube or Flickr uploaders).

But the segmentation does do a good job of grouping the population as a whole on something more meaningful than demographics in order to make better sense of them. Maybe, however, there is a micro-segmentation of Creators lurking somewhere under the hood of Forrester’s research.

Here are some other facts that Charlene Li mentions on the Groundswell blog that you can find if you twiddle around with this tool:

• Although social media participation significantly increases the lower on the age range you go, even among the 55+ group in the US, you’ll find that 33% of them are connecting with social applications in some way.
• 41% of Koreans are Joiners — members of social networks — more than anywhere else in the world.
• In Urban China, a full 36% are Creators, which means that this very significant percentage of the population is creating blogs, maintaining content, or uploading videos or music.

I’d like to play around more with this dataset (hint to Forrester!) and maybe later I’ll have some more insight nuggets to share.

When paired with the simple steps outlined below, there is no better tool for managing the torrents of blog feeds and news posts on the Web than Google Reader.

I am currently subscribed to over 100 blogs and news services, all centered around digital marketing, marketing research, media and advertising, and general Web 2.0 type stuff.

That means anywhere from 50 articles and posts per day on the weekend, to almost 400 on a busy weekday. And I have a relatively narrow window between work and family (5:00AM to 7:30AM) to both read them and write my own posts.

Which is why Google Reader, paired with some knowledge management techniques I learned from digital photography workflows, has been such a critical asset to me.

Since I can’t really read 400 posts a day, I needed a way to quickly separate what interests me from what doesn’t. In a tool such as Photoshop Lightroom, the point of a digital photography workflow is to quickly eliminate all the out of focus and hopeless images, and identify and sort the ones that really matter for further editing, all through use of flags and keywords.

I follow a similar process with Google Reader by use of tag folders, the J-key shortcut, and the Star function.

1. First I sort RSS feeds into macro topic tag folders (marketing research, advertising, economics, etc.). You can do this by tagging a feed after you subscribe to it by using the Feed Settings drop down menu.
2. I then create a Read First folder of blogs whose postings are ones that I find I always read in detail. I move this folder to the top of my list. The neat thing about Google Reader is that a feed can reside in multiple places, so Seth Godin’s blog is in both my marketing and Read First folders.
3. When I then check my feeds, I go right to the Read First folder, since I generally find myself wanting to read most of what these writers post. If there is something I want to come back to, I then hit the S-key in order to flag it for the Star folder.
4. I then go through the postings in the remaining folders. Blogs like Mashable! and news sources like MarketingVox have tons of posts everyday, some of which hold interest for me and some of which don’t. Which is where the J-key comes in. For everything but the Read First items, I give the post a second or two scan based upon the headline and the first sentence. Then I either hit the J-key or Star it to come back to it later.
5. Which means if you are creating content that is being read through a feed reader, some of these best practices from Copyblogger and Problogger on headline and copy writing are critical. If I’m scanning 100 blog post headlines in less than 5 minutes, it’s the well written and succinct headlines that capture my attention and my S-key.
6. After I’ve gone through all the new items (make sure Google Reader is set to only show you new items), if I have the time, I go back through and read in more detail the starred items.
7. These remaining posts are read and saved, or discarded by use of the S-key again, which toggles off the star.
8. I don’t used the Star folder for permanent storage however. I’ve lately paired the social bookmarking tool De.licio.us with Google Reader, which allows me to store posts I find while I’m surfing the web, as well as stuff from Google Reader.
9. On occasion, I look at the Trends report from Google Reader. This helps me identify upcoming feeds for inclusion in the Read First folder, as well as those that have gone inactive and may be candidates for deletion.
10. And from there: rinse, wash, repeat as necessary.

For a much more intricate system that is designed to handle a much greater volume of feeds, check out this one from Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion.

The key is to develop a Google Reader system that works for you; otherwise, you may end up with the exact opposite.

In addition to TouchGraph, another research tool that helps with search visualization is Quintura.

Quintura takes a key word cloud approach to search, which is at first seems mundane, but then becomes much more intriguing as you add more search terms.

Just like I did with TouchGraph, I typed in “Crowdsourcing”. Instead of colored bubbles with links, I had a word cloud.

By just hovering my cursor over another key word, however, I opened a whole new set of links. Clicking on a key word simply added it to my list, and reorganized my word cloud around two key words rather than one.

The nice thing about Quintura is that it is quick. What it lacks in visual fireworks versus TouchGraph, it more than makes up for that in speed and clarity.

By pairing Quintura with Del.icio.us, I was able to assemble several links for a future post on social media in a fraction of the time I would have took with multiple Google searches.

Quintura recently announced a local site embed, with more blogger specific tools to come.

Until then, Quintura remains a very strong way to visualize link knots of different themes or ideas in the pursuit of better online marketing research.

In my previous post on search visualization, I cited a couple examples of search engines that examine link knots, or clusters of sites and pages organized around a similar theme.

I’d like to go into more detail on each of the three, since they each approach search visualization slightly differently.

The first site I’ll look into is TouchGraph. The site has Java applets for mapping link knots on either Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Using the Google applet, I typed in one of my favorite topics “crowdsourcing” (see a previous post on crowdsourcing here) and hit the Graph It! button.

What you get back are groupings of visual clusters, with each cluster representing groups of links that are related to a particular aspect of crowdsourcing. There are blog sites, articles, companies who specialize in crowdsourcing applications, etc.

I then click on the + symbol that was around a blog post on ReadWriteWeb that provided an overview of crowdsourcing. Another group of links popped up that were directly related to that particular post, one of which was a post that appeared in Mashable about Cambrian House, a software developer with a “crowd-sourced” based development strategy .

By expanding again on the Cambrian House post, I can see another cluster of related links, this time focused on Cambrian House itself. So you can see how this can go on and on and on….

TouchGraph as a research tool not only shows you relevant links to a particular topic, it does it in a very visually appealing way.

The interface is a little slow and take some getting used to, but the reward is that you can visualize information in a much broader context than you currently can do with Google today.