text: Monitor your social space with 7 tools and 16 minutes of setup. | Direct Marketing Observations
  If you're the average person, you don't have time for paid monitoring tools; and furthermore, you really don't want to mess with complicated social media monitoring tools or setup either. So what do you do if you want to monitor your space, your company, your name and your competition?
  You check out these 7 easy tools with even easier setups.
  With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there's a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what's happened and how people have reacted.
  1) Meet. Google Replay. To check out this feature, do the following:
  Go to the Google homepage, click on the show options link, and then click on updates. Make sure you have already typed in a search term and then see what happens. A waterfall of real time data coming from Twitter. Time elapsed: 30 seconds
  2) Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Time to set up: 5 minutes
  keeping tabs on your local news or teams
  3) Monitter is so simple its scary, just plug in words or terms in each of the three columns and go watch the firehose of data coming from Twitter. Time to set up: 1 minute
  4) I'll add Social Mention, though sometimes the results are a bit odd, but the setup might take one minute, which is what we're talking about here. Time to set up: 2 minutes
  5) and 6) The next 2 are great for seeing where someone might have a social profile setup. Knowem and Usernamecheck are both solid. Set up time: 7 minutes
  7) Backtype takes about 30 seconds and allows you to monitor stuff. Time to set up: 30 seconds
  Honorable mention: Watchthatpage Notify.me
  This entry was posted in social media monitoring and tagged analytics, listening and monitoring, marc meyer, social media monitoring, web analytics by marc meyer. Bookmark the permalink.
  5 thoughts on "Monitor your social space with 7 tools and 16 minutes of setup."
  Chris Gambol on April 19, 2010 at 9:28 pm said:
  FYI – that is the Time Warner Cable logo and it is most likely copywrited, trademarked or incorporated (whatever they do to protect logos). Just wanted to give you a headsup. I used to work for Time Warner Cable so I know; that is the ear and eye logo.
  Many thanks for the links to these sites and tools – very useful stuff here!
  Marketing, Idomeneo Enterprises
  Drew McLellan on April 20, 2010 at 4:18 am said:
  Excellent tool round-up — thank you. I also find that just doing some google and twitter key word searches and throwing the RSS feed into my Google Reader keeps me pretty plugged in!
  marc meyer on April 20, 2010 at 12:54 pm said:
  @Drew Love your suggestions, but lets assume that I'm not on Twitter and I have no clue what an RSS is..:) That was the angle I was trying to take. Minimal setup, not much of a learning curve and still able to get rolling with some minimal monitoring. But I'm with you, Twitter and Google Keyword searches is a great addition.
  @Chris, thanks, that was a total brain cramp on my part. Thanks for the heads up, I made the change.