Complete Web Monitoring

Putting It All Together

We’ve seen that conversations are made up of people (the LTOF, the fanatics, and the occasional contributors), the topics they’re discussing, and the eight types of community platform.

Your job is to search, join, moderate, or run each of these communities to get the visibility into your online presence that your organization needs.

• To follow the people who drive your community, use search tools and interact with community members on social networks. Subscribe via RSS to blogs they write and encourage them to join mailing lists and forums you moderate. Consider interviewing them for blog entries or showcasing things they’re doing.

• To track topics that matter to you, rely on prospective and retrospective search. Set up a dashboard for topics that matter, featuring sites and search results for those topics. Aggregate data from micromessaging services. Create and use hashtags for the topics you care about, and reference them in your communications and on your site. If mailing lists don’t exist, create and promote them.

• To be sure you’re looking at the right sites, keep track of inbound traffic and the sites that come up in alerts, and aggregate their content using more targeted search and tools (such as Yahoo! Pipes) that can consolidate multiple feeds. Find the sites where you’re the subject of conversation, and if those sites don’t exist, launch them yourself.