How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Dashboard on a ShoeString
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How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service Marshall Sponder (Webmetricsguru.com) explains how to build your own social media monitoring tool using the many free services available, including Yahoo Pipes, Tattler (a Drupal module) RSS feeds and Netvibes. This is a non-technical session.
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How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Dashboard on a ShoeString
- 1. Marshall Sponder Webmetricsguru.com March 31, 2010 London How to Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service on a Shoestring
- 2. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard I have written a draft version of an eBook available on Scribd - http://www.scribd.com/doc/29039169/How-to-Build-Your-Own-Social-Media-Monitoring-Service-Marshall-Sponder-Webmetricsguru-dot-com-3-31-2010-V2 I hope to have a clean version of Social Influence Monitoring On a Shoestring in a few months for those of you here today . Feel free to download a copy to continue and enhance what your are learning today at #msmb10
- 3. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Thereis a crowded landscape of free and next to free tools each excellent in it’s own way.
- 4. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Netvibes – you can build a dashboard in an hour This Dashboard works for an individual or small brand – it’s free and fast to set up. Note – there are no alerts here but this is easy enough to set up in Google Alerts if needed. Refer to pages 19-21 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 5. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Addictomatic – you can build a dashboard a few minutes Addictomatic replaces NetVibes – it’s actually a one step NetVibes without the work of picking feeds. You can view your custom Addictomatic page whenever you want – but it’s not private page and anyone can see it. Refer to pages 22-23 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 6. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Tattler – you can build a dashboard but it will take several hours to configure. Tattler so difficult and un-user friendly that it would take a true enthusiast of this tool to get anything useful out of it – but once you do–Tattler could replace Radian6, Alterian or any of the other Self Serve platform. Refer to pages 24-25 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 7. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Build your own dashboard using iGoogle – very labor intensive approach. In this approach you do a lot of keyword research, including misspellings, and set Google Alerts on all of them – this feeds into iGoogle Dashboard which you can customize. Refer to pages 25-47 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 8. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Use SocialMention, FeedRinse, Google Reader, and Postrank Analytics Once you get your data into Google Reader the results aren’t tagged (so you’d have to do that yourself) and there’s no ability to graph the charts – but if all you need is reputation monitoring and you queries do not change , and you don’t need alerts – this solution works. Refer to pages 48-49 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 9. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Use REALMON9 Yet another free social media monitoring platform, runs on Google’s servers http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/commoditized-social-communications-monitoring-web2express/ If you just wait long enough – Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space – but in a way, they already have, indirectly, though their developers using Google’s servers and application frameworks. Refer to pages 50-52 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 10. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Use Yahoo! Pipes I’m not a fan of using Yahoo! Pipes for a Social Media dashboard but thought to include an example of Yahoo! Pipes for Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp. Example: http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose Refer to pages 53-56 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 11. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Use UBERVU Very promising package that I have looked at recently http://www.webmetricsguru.com/archives/2010/02/web-journal-feb-22-26-facebook-analytics-tracking-social-crm-theme/ You can try many features of UBERVU for free without signing up but even if you do sign up the platform is inexpensive for what it offers http://www.ubervu.com/pricing/
- 12. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Free and low cost tools that can supercharge your Social Media Monitoring Dashboard - trackur Andy Beal’s Trackur is now free for one search – but if that’s all you need – this is good way to go. Refer to pages 57-58 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 13. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Free and low cost tools that can supercharge your Social Media Monitoring Dashboard - Viralheat Viralheat is an excellent low cost platform that can, in many cases, replace more expensive self serve models like Radian6 – but bear in mind there are many restrictions on the lower cost accounts – still, at 29.00 USD per month – you can’t lose. Note: Viralheat has come out with a new Influencer Module that looks promising Refer to pages 59-64 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 14. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard While free and low cost packages can be a good way to explore monitoring your online reputation or following an issue as it develops – it rarely is enough if serious questions need answering. When your business starts to charge money for analysis the free tools will probably not cut it. In many cases there’s still lack of a historical database (you can’t go back more than a few weeks) and it’s difficult or next to impossible to customize the way information is viewed. Free and Low cost tools may include Twitter Monitoring, which is usually treated separately as there are many free Twitter monitoring tools. Facebook and other social networks are rarely captured in a sufficient degree to make them useful. Multilanguage support is missing from most free and low cost tools and if those features are important to you – then you should move up to a more advanced package such as Radian6 or Sysomos.
- 15. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard As you needs for monitoring become more sophisticated the low end tools will not be able to meet the challenges of your monitoring – however, what is “low end” vs. “self-serve”, “Broad”, Specialized and even DIY are constantly changing – what is expensive today may end up being free tomorrow. Refer to pages 65-66 of How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Service.
- 16. Building your own Social Monitoring Dashboard Contact me: Marshall Sponder Webmetricsguru.com @webmetricsguru Now.seo@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
- If you want to use NetVibes you can – here’s a good post on how to use NetVibes for your Social Media Dashboard - http://blog.michaelleis.com/2009/04/diy-social-media-monitoring-dashboards/According to Michael Leis – From Google blog search, to SocialMention to twitter search to backtype; if you’re trying to monitor your brand mentions in the social space with or without the aide of professional tools, you’re quickly buried under a tabvalanche.Tabvalanche (tab•va•lanche) n.Being buried under so many open tabs that it slows your Web browser and computer to a crawl.To avoid the Tabvalanche, I recommend Netvibes as a way to make your own social media dashboard. Netvibes is one of a handful of customizable Web-based start pages that use widgets. In a space with Pageflakes, iGoogle, and My Yahoo, I find Netvibes the easiest to use.Here’s how you do it:Sign up for a Netvibes accountClick the big green “Add content” button in the upper left of the screenIn the sub navigation click “Essential widgets.”On the lower right-hand side of boxes that appear, you’ll see a button called “Web page.”Enter your search page results URL in the text-entry box that appears (not the original URL, so instead of “http://search.twitter.com” you paste “http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Hong+Kong+Phooey”) Many results pages, like the example above, also offer the RSS version of the search results. In this case, you’ll want to substitute clicking the “Add a feed” button for step two. Then rinse and repeat for all the services available to search out your brand mentions. Your computer and productivity will thank you. I have to say, this isn’t an original idea by me. Sadly, I can’t remember where I read this technique originally to attribute it, but it’s quite useful.This is the kind of dashboard you could build with Netvibes within an hour if you so desire – this is a Dashboard created by Duct Tape Marketing.“…I quickly set something up on Netvibes (you could do this in iGoogle, MyYahoo, Pageflakes too) that would allow me to track various Google Alerts, twitter searches, Boardtracker searches and backtype searches along with my own Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn activity. There are lots of pre-build widget for things like twitter, but pretty much anything with an RSS feed can be added to the page. Netvibes is easy to work with and this might be a nice way to keep it all front and center.”This kind of Dashboard works for an individual or small brand – it’s free and fast to set up. Note – there are no alerts here but this is easy enough to set up in Google Alerts if needed.
- Using Addictomatic for a Social Media DashboardAddictomatic replaces NetVibes – it’s actually a one step NetVibes without the work of picking feeds – Addictomatic does it for you and you can view your custom Addictomatic page whenever you want – but it’s not private page – so whatever your seeing – someone else can, too.According to Thomas TrumbleAddictomatic is a nice little tool that I found out about the other day. It’s a social media search aggregator that produces a custom webpage of the results and is great for a quick review of mentions of a term that you input across a variety of social media site. For example, I did a vanity search for myself and turned up my name on Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, Bloglines and Wordpress. Addictomatic is not a social media account finder like Spokeo, so it doesn’t turn up all of the media that I am producing and posting. Addictomatic aggregates mentions of your query across social media sites, in this case my name, not the footprint of my profiles across social media sites. For a quick review of social media buzz, this is a great tool, but it doesn’t provide enough depth to make it a tool for much more than that. Use it for snapshots, but look to other more robust tools for real social media listening and measurement. Notice that Thomas mentions Addictomatic lacks depth – you get what you pay for – this is a nice tool for a simple monitoring solution a small business or individual might want to perform – but is not useful more much else (but there is a place for this “free” social media aggregation in small organizations and non-profits that cannot afford much else).Visualizing what you might measure in a Social Media Dashboard you build yourselfIf you want to get a handle on to monitor – take a look at this diagram above. Whatever you build via NetVibes or other methods, keep in mind you have a vast and ever changing landscape to monitor.
- Tattler – Build your own” open sourced” Social Monitoring Platform I investigated TattlerTattler main screenWe found Tattler so difficult and un-user friendly that it would take a true enthusiast of this tool to get anything useful out of it – but once you get used to it – its possible Tattler could, on the face of it, replace Radian6, Alterian or other such Self Serve platform.However, since Tattler is open sourced – meaning that the developer communities self develops a platform, no one is paid to do this, it’s all volunteer work – it’s not clear how often or well Tattler is, could or will be maintained – and who would you go to when you have a problem with the platform?Also, the bar is constantly being raised in Social Media – last year “monitoring” conversations in Social Media was no so common and people weren’t sure what was good monitoring vs. not so good monitoring … self serve and high end Social Media tools are evolving past simply monitoring conversations to acting on them. As a result, much cheaper platforms such as ViralHeat.com have evolved that are on par or superior to Tattler at little or no cost – making the effort of supporting your own Drupal installation of Tattler not really worth the effort for most people. In this case, there is too much complexities with what is essentially become a “commodity” – monitoring online data.Tattler is probably more work than anything you would it get out of it (all Drupal patches need to be updated and you must run Tattler on your own server) – but it’s possible that some organizations could leverage a tool like Tattler – but I think Tattler is more suitable for a more technical audience.
- Note: the post this information came from was as Marty Weintraub’s Reputation Monitoring Dashboard (see http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/)
- Refer to http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/social-media-monitoring.html as the original source of this information which I adapted for this presentation.