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Monitoring the Blogosphere doesn’t need to cost $60,000 a year
John Stith of WebProNews and BL Ochman talk about services to monitor the blogosphere for your company that cost ungodly amounts … like $60,000 a year. Monitoring the blogosphere is very important (critical IMHO to some business) for companies today. But … look this isn’t rocket science. I do it everyday and combinations of free tools make it pretty darn easy.
Yes, I am a techie and geek … but I’m also busy and I don’t have time to mess around. While I respect the businesses trying to make a business from this and I’m sure they provide a value in writing up reports and giving clients easy to absorb info … I think there is a lot you can do yourself.
How? Well I’m going to talk about this at the upcoming RSS conference in depth and give a workshop on this as well at the end of the conference proper … but here’s a top line toolkit:
Search engines:
RSS reader:
- Lektora (we have almost fixed the Firefox 1.5 compatibility issue … I have a Windows version available if you’d like to test it)
- Bloglines
That’s all you need to get going. Essentially, what you are doing is searching for a term or website, saving the search in a way the RSS reader can check and you’re done. Now … fitting this into your business is not too hard. Using existing staff resources can make it very time efficient. Couple this with an internal blog and Qumana (Qumana and Lektora will soon be fully integrated allowing you to go from RSS reader to blog post or e-mail with a couple clicks) and you’re a couple steps away from a self-contained and dynamic competitive intelligence system.
Sound easy? Yeah it actually is. What often is hard is companies making it part of people’s jobs to do this and having them realize that this is just as important following commentaries in the press.
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