What’s Your Favourite Tool For Monitoring Conversations?
I’ve been thinking a lot about social media monitoring recently. I’m presenting on the topic at a couple of upcoming conferences, and I’m spending an increasing amount of time working in this area in my day job.
As conversations become increasingly fragmented – blogs and discussion boards/forums are no longer the only source of discussion out there – they’re becoming increasingly more complex to monitor.
What’s more, there are thousands upon thousands of conversations happening, in real-time, online. The sheer quantity is almost overwhelming and it’s only going up.
So what do we do?
There are plenty of tools out there that let us monitor online conversations…
…the free ones, for example…
- Google Blog Search (and Google Alerts in general)
- Technorati
- Twitter Search
- Everyzing
- Icerocket
- Blogpulse
- Delicious
- YouTube
- BackType
…and the professional ones, for example…
The search and monitoring tools out there are almost as diverse as the media we’re monitoring, and I’m seeing increasing interest from organizations in using these tools to listen.
So, I have a question for you:
What is your favourite monitoring tool (or tools)?
What have you found to be the most comprehensive/easiest to use/most logical/most cost effective?
What services might the rest of us have missed?
(If you want to hear more about social media monitoring, I’m presenting a workshop on the topic as part of a "Social Media Master Class" at The Canadian Institute’s Social Media conference in December and I’m doing a session on the topic at PodCamp Toronto 2009.)