Are you listening to the social media web?

Listening, in the social media web, is being able to monitor conversations around your brand and industry, and consequently being able to respond effectively. When many people think of listening in the social media web, they might think of being able to respond to a post on twitter, but listening is much more in-depth than just responding to a couple of social networking sites. In fact, listening can be applied all social networking sites, and still not be fully effective, given that’s there other mediums of social media available.

There are now some companies that are offering options for social media listening. Sysomos, Radian 6, webtrends, scoutlabs, and other companies offer the ability to monitor and listen to the social media web, but as far as I can tell, such applications come at a cost (I looked around the sites for each of these companies, but couldn’t find any information on pricing). This isn’t such an issue for a large business, but can be for a small business that may need want to monitor social media, but also needs to factor in budget issues.

Small businesses may need to get creative about how they listen and monitor social media sites. Using an application like Tweetdeck is somewhat useful, but ultimately limited due to the simple fact that it can only connect to so many social networking sites.

RSS feeds for blogs can be useful for keeping track of blogs you like or podcasts or other social media technology, but again there’s only so many blogs etc., you can follow and you’ll miss out on some of the conversations that might pertain to your business if you don’t know the conversation is happening.

Yahoo Pipes looks fairly promising, although you have to get past the initial steep learning curve to use the tech. You can create specific “pipes” that search social media for information and then provide it to you. It’s a useful way to group multiple rss feeds under a specific label so that you can follow multiple blogs and get one notification for all of them.

The other way to do social media monitoring for free is through Google Alerts and Step Rep, which with judicious use of search words, will help you monitor what people are saying about your brand on different sites.

Ultimately though you may want to go with a company such as the ones I mentioned above. I recommend doing some research on each company and determining how their technology will simplify your listening efforts as well as enable as you to respond quickly to what’s happening on the social media web.

Do you have any other suggestions for social media listening?