C&M’s Top 5 Online PR and Social Media Monitoring (and Engagement) Tools of 2008
Seems to be that reviews list time of year, so we thought we’d join the party. Here’s our top five Online PR and Social Media ‘buzz’ monitoring (and engagement) tools of the year.
NB: A health warning – when combined in the right fashion in Netvibes (or any decent RSS feed reader), they can become extremely (extremely!) addictive!!!
1: BackType
BackType is an uber-monitoring and discovery tool for the Blogsphere. It’s jaw-droppingly good and simple. Use it to locate the blogs that you care for and – even more usefully – for following specific people’s comments trails.
…ie, once you’ve identified a blog of note, you can use it to trace the ‘footprints’ to and from it by discovering all the other blogs that the blog author and the blog’s active commentators have been commenting on. In other words it’s a superb tool for establishing spheres of influence and then getting engaged within them.
- Addiction Rating = 5 (out of 5… be careful!)
- Usefulness Uber-Proxy Index Score = 5 (out of 5)
- Ease of Use-ology = 4 (out of 5)
- Ouput to RSS-i-ness = 5 (out of 5… creates an RSS feed for everything, so that you can take the monitoring feeds and plug them straight into Netvibes, etc)
2: MonitorThis
MonitorThis made me fall of my chair sometime this autumn. It’s a keyword monitoring tool on speed (and perhaps acid). It simply creates a bunch of RSS feeds based on keyword searches on just about every major search engine and blog and/or social search tool there is.
For example, if you’re interested in ‘Online PR’ it’ll squirt you out a single OPML file that plugs into your RSS feed reader and gives you a view of whatever ‘Online PR’-related blog posts, Tweets, news stories, etc, are circulating on the big bad Interweb – in real time.
- Addiction Rating = 5 (out of 5… be careful!)
- Usefulness Uber-Proxy Index Score = 5 (out of 5)
- Ease of Use-ology = 2 (out of 5… takes a while to futz around with)
- Ouput to RSS-i-ness = 5 (out of 5… creates an RSS feed for everything, so that you can take the feeds and plug them straight into Netvibes, etc)
3: Conversation
Conversation is a natty, affordable tool from our good friends at eCairn. It’s a blog monitoring and discovery tool with a difference: it’s built to be used by teams in a ‘project mode.’ In other words, it’s a web-based collaborative space where you can identify blogs and then share them, and interact with them with your colleagues.
For instance, once you’ve identified a blog ecosystem, Conversation gives you a realtime stream of post updates which you can preview inline, comment upon, annotate and then send useful alerts to other people. We’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s become an essential part of any project-based blog work we do.
- Addiction Rating = 4 (out of 5… it’s a working tool rather than a drug!)
- Usefulness Uber-Proxy Index Score = 5 (out of 5)
- Ease of Use-ology = 4 (out of 5… interface takes a while to get used to)
- Ouput to RSS-i-ness = 5 (out of 5… creates an RSS feed for everything, so that you can take the feeds and plug them straight into Netvibes, etc)
4: Addictomatic
The name Addictomatic says it all. This tool is a low-fi version of MonitorThis for people who don’t necessarily want or need to tailor their monitoring interface or their variety of feed sources.
In simple terms, it provides a basic search interface that runs keyword queries against a bunch of important social, search and blog services. Easy as pie to use. Just try it!
- Addiction Rating = 4 (out of 5… MonitorThis is more powerful, but this is a close second!)
- Usefulness Uber-Proxy Index Score = 4 (out of 5 …MonitorThis gives more depth)
- Ease of Use-ology = 5 (out of 5… easy as a Google search)
- Ouput to RSS-i-ness = 0 (out of 5… essentially its an RSS aggregation tool – a dashboard-like substitute for a customised/personalized service/tool)
5: Mint
Mint is very fresh indeed. OK, so it’s a web site analytics tool rather than an Online PR monitoring tool, but it warrants a place on this list because it’s so sweet and simple… and very, very addictive.
In short, it puts all your web site KPI’s on one page so that you can stare at the screen and watch your site work its magic in real time…. and learn stacks about its performance along the way – like which of your pages are working the hardest, how ‘findable’ you really are, who your best referral sources are and which of your keywords efforts are working the best.
- Addiction Rating = 5 (out of 5… be careful!)
- Usefulness Uber-Proxy Index Score = 5 (out of 5)
- Ease of Use-ology = 5 (out of 5… once it’s set up – but you’ll need a techy to help you install it!)
- Ouput to RSS-i-ness = 0 (out of 5… it’s more a report aggregation tool, a dashboard, and not meant to be spliced – though no doubt you could if you tried!)
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