Complete Web Monitoring

Community Listening Platforms

Clearly, there’s a tremendous amount of work required to find, engage, and report on communities. If you just consider the eight communities we’ve seen, and the four ways you can get involved (search, enrollment, moderation, and running them), and the options to report, join, amplify, or contact members within a community, you have a daunting number of possibilities. Multiply this by the thousands of messages you might receive, and there’s no way to keep up manually.

There are several tools and techniques for tracking your community presence. First of all, you can use consolidated reporting sites like Trendrr, shown in Figure 14-56, to collect and report on a variety of metrics.

Figure 14-56. Trendrr is a general-purpose tool for tracking multiple sources of online data in a single place

Many commercial platforms, such as Radian6, Techrigy, ScoutLabs, BuzzMetrics, Sysomos, and BuzzLogic, provide reports and automate many of the search techniques we’ve outlined here (we’re convinced that the term “buzz” has been forever claimed by this segment of the monitoring industry). Still other services and tools focus on bulk messaging and automated responses to handle a growing number of direct interactions between a company and its communities.

Regardless of the vendor, community monitoring tools do three basic things:

• Find conversations across many community platforms ...