Tracking Where Your Organization and Your Issues are Discussed Online
Facilitated by Matt Garcia, Aspiration
Session Description
Matt has done extensive research in "social media listening", utilizing tools like Netvibes to track where organizations are mentioned online and how social media messaging propagates. In this session, he'll demonstrate the the Netvibes platform that Aspiration uses, and talk about how he uses the data that comes back to build relationships and find relevant online conversations.
Facilitated by: Matt Notes by: Todd Other Participants: Sarah, Amanda, David, Robyn, Mat, Laney (sp?)
Summary
- Like it's name implies, RSS feeds are Really Simple Syndication...feeds - they help you track keywords about your organization on the web
- For non-profits, it's recommended to start with just the organization name, but once you're used to it you can search for your ED's name, keywords, like-minded orgs., and possibly opponents to your cause
- Matt recommends NetVibes as a dashboard to view your RSS feed. It's easy to see them all in one place, and multiple people from your org can use it at one time.
- There are a ton of great resources to track not only keywords that search spiders find, but blog entries, comments in response to blog entries, discussion boards, people who are sharing your shortened url., etc.
- For details, visit the note
"Full" Session Notes
RSS - Really Simple Syndication (it's easy! we swear!)
- http://netvibes.com - a decent dashboard for displaying RSS feeds. This can be a shared dashboard, so multiple people in your org can use/view it.
Netvibes is just another way to display rss feeds all in one place -- helps you to track different key words,
same as google reader, dashboard just displays the info differently
(igoogle is theoretically another option to display your rss feeds)
you can subscribe to rss searches -- this way, you can track whenever new content appears in a search
good to focus on organization's name, your ED's name, other important keywords
Good references:
- http://blogsearch.google.com - doesn't use spiders to find info, evey online rss feed is registered to this search.
"I think that google alerts is just a lot of noise, blogsearch is much richer data -- less noise"
- http://backtype.com - searches blog comments for the keywords you are looking for. This helps fill in the gaps that Google's blogsearch misses.
- http://backtweets.com - find out who is shortening your URL!
- http://search.twitter.com - search twitter
(short side comments on http://bit.ly - very useful for A/B testing. this can be a quick way to track what new is appearing, and manage all of your Bitly links at the same time)
Facebook is really hard to search b/c of the privacy settings -- don't expect much when trying to search for mentions within Google
- http://socialmention.com - attempts to find comments on Facebook, MySpace, etc.
- http://boardreader.com - searches discussion boards
- http://delicious.com - good only if you have a tag on Delicious you want to track
- http://flickr.com - good only if you have a tag on flickr you want to track
Idea -- good to also track like-minded groups or organizations (or opponents!)
What are NetVibes' archiving policies? Do they archive? Is the limiting factor the
Is there a program/service that allows you to download/archive your rss feeds?
Matt's suggestion to NPOs: try it out for your organization's name w/ just 3 rss feeds. Don't start with too much!
Question: Tweemap - used to show the locations of where your tweets are coming from. Tweemap no longer works, but it used to be great. Are there any other geo-location tools for showing where your tweets are coming from?