How To Set-Up A Buzz Monitor Feed

Knowing who is talking about your band / brand is the key to effective marketing.

The first thing we do when asked to work with an artist, venue or production is to set up a monitoring network to catch who is talking about them.

STEP ONE

First, you will need:

• A Google Account
• A Yahoo Account

Next, you need to set up accounts with the following services and in the “Search” box, type in the name of the band/brand. If it has two words then remember to use quote marks, e.g. “One Eskimo”.

• Google Alerts (use your Google account)
• Social Mention
• FriendFeed – type in your search term and the RSS is in the search bar
• Twitter Search – the advanced search is worth using. The RSS feed is top right.
• Boardtracker – the RSS is clear at the bottom of the search. (Version 2 is very slow and appears to have been abandoned)
• Backtype – check comments left on blogs. RSS on the right hand side
• Technorati – Searches blogs. Takes a little bit of trial and error to get the right RSS. I find it is better to search Tags for better results.
• Yacktrack – another way to monitor comments left of blogs, including your own
• YouTube – simply do a search and the result is an RSS feed
• Flickr
• Whostalkin
• TrendRR.com

You should now have a list of RSS feeds that look like this:

• http://www.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=%22one+eskimo%22&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
• http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22one+eskimo%22
• http://socialmention.com/search?q=%22one+eskimo%22&t=blogs&f=rss
• http://boardtracker.com/srss/?search=%22one%20eskimo%22&page=1&cat=1&order=1&scope=4&sitelimit=&boardid=&for=0

STEP TWO

You now have two choices. You can either put all these feeds in to Google Reader (or your preferred RSS reader). Or, if you want to publish these then you need to aggregate them in to one feed. To do this use Yahoo Pipes.

Use your Yahoo login and Create New Pipe. Use ‘Fetch Feed’ and place each RSS feed in a separate box. Use ‘Union’ to bring all your feeds together and ‘Sort’ to get them in to chronological order.

I’ve simplified this because Pipes has quite a steep learning curve and a tutorial would take all day….

STEP THREE

You will now have a single RSS feed that is an aggregate of all your feeds. Now, you can take this feed and put it through Feedburner. Do this to make a far simpler RSS URL and also to benefit from all the stats and extra functions offered by Feedburner.

Now you should have a URL like this

http://feeds.feedburner.com/OneEskimoBuzz

You can place this in your RSS reader or Mail. If you’re reporting back to someone else, use Google Reader and only share the relevent feeds since despite careful searching there may still be a lot of irrelevent information that needs to be sorted out

About Neil

Neil Cartwright founded Million Media in 2006 with the aim to help people understand digital marketing and use it to their advantage. The vision hasn't changed but the technology has.

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