"Tools of the Trade"

Paul Gillin discusses in the chapter titled “Tools of the Trade”, the necessary use of products and services that alert you when the media is talking about any topic. If he hasn’t yet convinced you to become a part of the blogosphere, he at least stresses the importance for a business marketer to know what is being said about him/her, a company, or product.

Gillin points out that some of these tracking services can cost a pretty penny but luckily, monitoring engines such as Google Alerts, Ask.com, and Yahoo! provide these services free. You can specify any topics for regular searches. An e-mail is sent to you when new results appear that informs you of the mention of your name, your company’s name, or a product name. People want to hear what the world is saying about them to better prepare themselves in case something such as a blog swarm occurs. Our class has seen first hand how these alert systems can be useful for big, bad, important CEO’s. Within an hour of posting about the new Jawbone viral ads on her blog, Christina Timms had a rather long comment from the CEO of Digital Axle. (See here and here) Most likely, this quick response was made possible by Bruce’s Google Alert or some other alert system that showed his name, Digital Axle’s name, and Jawbone all tagged. Because of the controversy with his firm's relation to the ad, he probably receives alerts on all of those names so that he can know what's being said and can quickly respond.

Gillin notes that familiarizing yourself with the advanced search features of any engine you choose to use is a good idea because many make searches even more specific and easier. In Yahoo!’s search engine a command called “linkdomain” gives a list of links to the page or domain that you specify and also allows you to choose one particular website to search.

Searching blogs is different because of the RSS feeds that bloggers use to show their blog was updated. The RSS feeds are monitored in blog-specific searches but are less effective when it comes to filtering the results of a specific search. Opinmind.com is really interesting. It classifies your search results by bias, which means the tone of a blog post is analyzed to display whether the opinion of the post is for or against the searched topic. Basically, you can separate the mean people from the nice ones by having Opinmind.com show if someone was trash-talking you, or praising you. Technorati is also a good tool to measure the popularity in blogosphere to determine how influential a bad post or good post will be for your search.

Podcasts also sometimes require different search engines due to the difficulty in indexing the content. Podscope.com and Podzinger.com are two that list podcasts that mention a specific search term. You can further use their services to listen to the exact segment in the podcast where your term is spoken.