Having an online presence requires online skills. PR professionals master the art or learn about how to make bloggers write about the company they work for, how to communicate with clients using Twitter, how to use corporate YouTube channels, how to create successful Facebook fan pages and so on.
But with thousands of people engaging in the online medium monitoring what is being said about a company is an issue. While monitoring agencies can deal with both offline (TV, radio and press) and online monitoring there are some free tools PR pros can use for an in-house online monitoring. I will briefly present four of them which I find handy to some extent: Technorati, Twitter search, Google Alerts, and RSS.
Technorati – allows key word and tag search in sites, blogs, posts, and news while filtering can be made by fields (entertainment, business, sports, politics etc) or by authority! (influence in the blogosphere).
Twitter search – specialist search engine for Twitter based on key words. The advanced search function allows search by words, people, places, dates, attitudes! and other.
Google Alerts – provides e-mail updates based on selected key words. User can choose from news, blogs, video, groups, and comprehensive (multiple sources) opting for frequency of updates (as it happens, once a day, once a week).
RSS – subscribers to RSS receive updated information on subjecst of interest under the form of the so-called feeds. RSS are available for websites, blog posts, comments, online publications etc.
By using these tools PR pros can have an idea about what is being blogged, tweeted and commented about a particular company, event, topic, person etc. Not only can they track references about a company but they can also monitor competitors and other industry-related subjects.
One can now easily say that “Monitoring has never been easier thanks to all these online tools.” This may not be necessarily true…Although some of the instruments provide web pages monitoring in many languages sometimes they fail to effectively show the expected results. For example Google Alerts set for Romanian language offers e-mail updates with stories published even years ago! Moreover, receiving and gathering all the online references about the topic of interest are just the first step. Companies need to allocate human resources to filter all the information (in order to eliminate “spam”) and organize it.
Bottom line – online monitoring tools are of great help but they do have some limitations.
Picture: Interactive Insights Group
Posts
