TechWag

While I am on the subject of measuring and metering social networking over on Toolbox, what I was thinking of was a simple approach that many people could take to monitor Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop for occurrences of keywords, like your company name. Fortunately both TweetDeck and Seesmic can allow you to monitor when your tag, alias, or keyword shows up in a search and you can see what people are saying.

Below is TweetDeck that will allow you to search twitter and facebook for occurrences of names, brands, and other information that is being sent along those social networks. In this case I am looking for where I work, my blog, and occurrences of my name (which is fortunately blank, which I hoped for). The upper buttons where you see where you can create custom searches for those two systems, you can also make one for MySpace but it is still regulated to just your friends, not the entire network like Twitter. Facebook has the same issue, in that you are only monitoring what your friends are saying. The good thing to do then is to search Facebook (and MySpace) for occurrences of your company name, your name, your alias, and make them your friends so you will get their status updates.

Seesmic will allow you to do the same thing, using the same contexts as TweetDeck so you can pick and choose the tool you most want to use. Both set up the same way with a custom search using the search feature on the upper right of the screen. Seesmic will not let you tap into your friends on MySpace, so the advantage to that is definitely with TweetDeck.

Overall by using custom searches you can find out what is being said about you, your brand, or your alias online. Which is great if you are tasked with following social media, but are finding it difficult to get developer time to build out a proper dashboard to monitor what is happening on the internet.

One other fast and dirty trick though is to use Outlook to monitor other channels by using the inbuilt RSS Function (Really Simple Syndication) that comes with Outlook. Systems like Google Search, FriendFeed, Google News and Google Blog search all let you save off a custom search as an RSS Feed and if you are using Outlook, you can quickly make a simple quick and dirty addition to your RSS Feeds in outlook and read those searches like you would email as shown below.

By doing this you pretty much have most of the internet covered if you need to find out what people are saying and doing around you, or your brand. This by no means replaces a proper dashboard, but incorporates many of the elements that a formal dashboard would have, and uses common office tools like Outlook to help you keep on top of what is being said online.