A quick tutorial from http://twitter.com/twgplus on how to build a free social media dashboard.

1. How To Set Up A Free Social Media Dashboard
In this tutorial, we’re going to set up a dashboard to help you monitor
mentions of your college or university in Facebook. We’ll be using
SocialMention.com, but you may also use IceRocket.com. Both
perform similar functions.
You may also follow this process for Twitter feeds, blogs, news,
comments and videos.
Tools You’ll Need
An RSS Reader – RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s
simply a method for staying in touch with the content from a website.
Popular readers are iGoogle, Google Reader and Netvibes.
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.
IceRocket.com – This is another search engine that allows you to
search Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news and images.
The Process
Identify your key terms – These are the words that your students
use when they talk about you. The can be as broad as your university
or college name or as narrow as a particular program that you offer.
Here are some examples:
• Ferrum College
• Gardner Webb
• “Methodist University”

2. • Georgia Bulldogs
• Go Cougars
Putting your phrase in between apostrophes tells the search engine
to look for that exact phrase – so it will return results for the words
“Methodist University” where they appear together.
Use other terms that are common to your admissions process. If you
are searching Twitter, use (#) hash tags to look for particular words:
• #admissions
• financial aid
• application deadline
Brainstorm different ideas and consider stringing phrases together,
like:
• “Elm University” + financial aid
• “Oak College” + dorm
• “Ash College” + attending
These phrases are very narrow and you’re not likely to see them pop
up very often, but once you have dashboard it takes nothing to
maintain the queries.
Set Up Your Reader – In the example, we’ll use iGoogle. This is your
personal home page with Google. If you don’t have it set up, go to
www.google.com/ig and create a gmail account.
Run Your Search Query – In this example we’ll use
www.socialmention.com.
Go to www.socialmention.com

3. On the first page, enter your query.
Click the “or select social media sources” link. Click the Facebook
radio button.
Click Search.
You’ll receive a list of results that represent how that phrase has been
used in Facebook updates. Note that these results only represent
statuses that are not “Friends Only”. They are visible to everyone.

4. Go to the RSS Feed link on the upper right of the screen and copy
the link address. Depending on your browser, you can right click the
link.

5. Add the query to your reader
From your Google home tab click the dropdown arrow and click “Add
a tab”
Go to the tab and on the right hand side click the “Add stuff” link.
On the lower left, click “Add feed or gadget”

6. Paste the URL.
Go back to your Google home page to see the feeds.
Repeat this process for other feeds like Twitter and blogs using
SocialMention.

7. Other Tools for Creating Searches
There are a variety of other tools for running search queries. This
guide only covers Social Mention, but if you are interested in trying
other sites, here’s a short list for you to browse.
Google alerts - Google Alerts allows you set-up customer searches
for any phase and receive email or RSS alerts 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.