"You said 'what' about me?"

A friend of mine, John Janstch of Duct Tape Marketing writes an excellent post on listening in the digital age.

You may read the entire post here and I’ll provide a summary below.

John writes, in today’s rapidly shifting business environment, listening is one of the key competitive tactics for small business owners.

Gone are the days of reputation management uncovered by spending time at the local barbershop.

He mentions by setting up a simple filtering system you can gain access to real-time conversations about:

• Your customer’s ongoing experience
• Any brand/product/leader mentions
• Complaints
• Inaccurate information about your organization

The key, John tells us, is to create a simple and most often free suite of analytics available to us all.

This do it yourself toolbox includes:

• Google alerts – My personal favorite. Google Alerts allows you to set-up your customer searches for any phrase and receive an email or RSS alert any time your phrase shows up in online media, blogs, web pages and news.
• Search.twitter – For now, monitoring twitter is a separate stream (Google seems to be adding twitter conversations to SERPs) – using the advanced search function allows you set-up very specific searches, even including geographic details. These searches produce RSS feeds and can then be subscribed to.
• tweetbeep.com – Similar to Google Alerts, but for twitter. Set-up search phrases and receive notification any time your phrases show up in twitter conversations.
• Boardtracker.com – focuses on the most popular bulletin board conversations and can turn up responses that don’t show up anywhere else. Some industries still have very heavy bulletin board use.
• Backtype.com – Backtype is a search engine of sorts that focuses on blog comments. Blog comments don’t often make it into the mainstream search results so this is a way to listen in on this set of content.
• Social Mention – this is a mashup search engine of many of the formats of content such as audio and video – I’ve found it a very nice way to turn up some mentions that don’t occur anywhere else.

Thanks to John’s great post, you can easily, and for free, setup your own online listening post for you and your clients.

Do you have any success stories of how you have utilized these or other monitoring tools? Comment below and share with us.