Viralogy

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Over the past couple of years, social media has been a buzz word that has flitted around countless marketing and corporate offices. Some have used it to build successful marketing campaigns, even for Presidents. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, some of those very marketers forgot that social media was about listening, not talking.

The thing about social media is that it’s not about you, the marketer, it’s about your consumer. Listening tools are unbelievably important in a world where you have absolutely no control over what your customer says about your brand, your products, or your industry. The success of the Frank Eliasons and Guy Kawasakis in social media isn’t about trying to shove content down your throat, however. It’s about listening, and then acting on your consumer’s needs.

So what are some great ways to listen to your customers on Twitter? Well, I’ve put together 5 great monitoring tools for listening to Twitter conversations about you and your brand using web tools (as opposed to apps like CoTweet and TweetDeck, which are just as useful). Have your own personal favorites? Please add them in the comments below.

Tools for Monitoring Twitter Conversations

Collecta
Collecta allows you to search in real time for Twitter, but also searches blogs and blog comments for mentions of a specific keyword. It’s a neat tool for someone looking for wide-ranging mentions of a brand. Another option for blogs is Google Blog Search.

Twitter Search
Easy and simple. Twitter Search can help you to search recent tweet mentions about your brand. You can’t search very far back, and it doesn’t have (m)any bells and whistles. But for simple research, it often does the job. And hey, if you’re a developer, you can use the Search API to automate the most relevant searches for your own brand/product.

Monitter
Looking for real-time local updates about certain terms? Monitter is what you want. Monitter makes everything pretty and easy for you. It takes the Twitter Search API and makes it much better looking, and more automated. Pretty much everything on Monitter is doable through Twitter Search, but that’s ugly, and using it for multiple search terms could take years and cost millions of lives. Nothing wrong with expediting the process.

Trendistic
Trendistic is great for a graphical view of tweets over time. Here you can see if your specific keywords are heating up or cooling off over time. A little more built-in benchmarking and comparison to other (even related) keywords would be a vast improvement. For now, though, it just focuses on one trend at a time.

Twendz
Waggener Edstrom’s Twendz integrates both the keyword/topic you are searching for with subtopics. If you have a powerful trending topic like Modern Warfare 2 that you’re trying to track, it’s useful to see which other terms are comingled with your own. The only downside is that the filtering isn’t quite so great yet. For example “Modern Warfare 2” returns “Duty” (which is part of the game’s title – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). However, a search like “Barack Obama” returns more interesting tags like “China”, and “war”. Just beware of the subliminal messaging (-:

Bonus Content: Tools for Monitoring Social Media Conversations

Here are a couple great tools for tracking social media mentions from other places. There are plenty of these tools available, but that’s another post for another day.

SocialMention
Social Mention is extremely cool. Not only does it track mentions, it tracks “sentiment” as well. Social Mention bases this metric on positive, neutral and negative phrases associated with your keyword. It also allows you to track a number of different networks including blogs, microblogs, comments and news. You can even see whether the sentiment is more positive for one medium or another. Also, you can harness their API for noncommercial use (or commercially, for a small fee).

Yahoo Site Explorer
This isn’t so much a tool as a great way to check your linkbacks. This is how you can actively see anyone that has linked back to content on your page. Input your own URL and make sure that you Show Inlinks “Except from this domain”. If you have a blog, this is a great way to see some of the feedback you’re getting, and where you’re being mentioned. Here’s an example of the Inlinks for Viralogy. Make sure you check for links including and excluding the www.

Jaremy Rich writes a technology, marketing and gaming blog called Techshots, and he loves references to Animal House. Get it?