Complete Web Monitoring

What Are People Saying About Me?

On an increasingly social web, your marketing has migrated beyond your website into chat rooms, user groups, social networking applications, news aggregators, and blogs. To properly understand what the Internet thinks of you, you need to watch the Web beyond your front door.

Your primary tool for this task is search. Hundreds of automated scripts crawl the Web constantly, indexing what they find. And most community sites offer some form of internal content search these days. A variant on traditional search, known as persistent search or prospective search, combs the Web for new content that matches search terms, then informs you of it.

Google Alerts dominates the prospective search market, with some other services, such as Rollyo, using competing search engines like Yahoo!. HubSpot offers integrated marketing to small businesses by combining topical searches, lead tracking, and similar functions, as shown in Figure 3-16. There are also many community listening platforms—Radian6, Techrigy, ScoutLabs, Sysomos, Keenkong and so on—that help community managers monitor their online buzz.

Figure 3-16. HubSpot ties community traffic to web analytics

In all of these models, you subscribe to a keyword across various types of sites (blogs, mailing lists, news aggregators, etc.), then review the results wherever someone is talking about things that matter to your ...