Call me a member of the late majority if you will, but over the last few weeks I've been experimenting with using Google Alerts through my feedreader to track blog mentions of some of our digital products (including Papers Past and the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society, this LibraryTechNZ blog and our Create Readers blog) .
[If you haven't tried this, go to Google Blog Search and enter your search term. At the end of the results page are three options: create an email alert, add a search widget to your Google homepage, or add a search feed to your Google Reader.]
Most days I'm getting around a dozen alerts. It's interesting seeing where mentions pop up. Some are what I'd expect - for example, the Auckland University Library History blog, Paul Reynolds and the Family Tree Forum (a genealogy discussion board) noting the relaunch of Papers Past with improved search functionality. Some are less so, like this mention of the site on the Furman University Libraries blog.
And some, in the words of an ex-manager of mine, surprise and delight me. Like articles from the Transactions and Proceedings being cited in discussions of global warming. The people who just love the Royal Society pictures. Or, my No. 1 favourite, Papers Past surfacing on John Adcock's Yesterday's Papers, in a post about Deadwood Dick.
It's not a comprehensive answer to the challenge of tracking what people are saying about your digital offerings, or how they're being used. And Google Alerts do seem to pull up old content (posts from August 2005???) . But it's time efficient, once you've selected your search terms. And it provides a window into the world of those users who don't love/hate you enough to get in touch directly.
Here's a list (via Marketing Pilgrim) of 26 free tools for monitoring buzz. Got another one? Add it in the comments .....
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Buzz Monitoring: Using Google Alerts to track the use of your digital products
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1 comments:
For the record: technorati brought me here!
You ask a slightly complex question actually.
If you want to just keep a pulse on the web in general - to see what everyone is up to, then it's really hard to go past a daily browse of something like popurls : gives you the latest/most popular sites, memes and news from all the major sites (from metafilter to delicious to flickr to youtube and tens of others) all on the one scannable page, with mouseover snips.
To see who mentions my blog, I use technorati mostly, but by far the most accurate way to discern who has mentioned you is a page statistics service (I use statcounter). The reason the stats service is so good is because not only does it show in real time where there's a mention, it also pulls up a lot of (for whatever reason) unindexed sites and more specifically, hidden sites such as forums -- ie. it is accurate in advising what site the visitor has come from: my daily count and the referral sites are the only stats I look at actually.
I am a 'content chaser' (looking for digital collections of images) and I find a lot of high branch fruit by backsearching to sites and forums from the stats page.
I've been using GoogleAlerts for about 6 months and I think they are mostly useless. I only use them for content though, so I can't put them down as a self-researching service. But you mention 2005 having come up; well, I have perma-searches on 'new digital exhibition' and similar terms and I constantly get very very useless returns from pre-2000.
That said, I do believe, if memory serves me well, that I originally found the NZ Proceedings via Alerts so it redeemed itself that way!
The best, most efficient modes to search however require a bit of in depth knowledge: yahoo pipes, smart URL string searches, search term rss feeds. They require some time at the start but if they are tweaked right, they ought to leave simple term (eg. NZ Proceedings or the somesuch) searches for dead. But again, it depends on how serious you want to be and what your ultimate goals are. If it's just navel gazing then I think technorati +/- blog search +/- stats review is enough.
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