How To Build Your Own Social Media Monitoring Dashboard on a ShoeString

Editor's Notes

1. If you want to use NetVibes you can – here’s a good post on how to use NetVibes for your Social Media Dashboard - http://blog.michaelleis.com/2009/04/diy-social-media-monitoring-dashboards/According to Michael Leis – From Google blog search, to SocialMention to twitter search to backtype; if you’re trying to monitor your brand mentions in the social space with or without the aide of professional tools, you’re quickly buried under a tabvalanche.Tabvalanche (tab•va•lanche) n.Being buried under so many open tabs that it slows your Web browser and computer to a crawl.To avoid the Tabvalanche, I recommend Netvibes as a way to make your own social media dashboard. Netvibes is one of a handful of customizable Web-based start pages that use widgets. In a space with Pageflakes, iGoogle, and My Yahoo, I find Netvibes the easiest to use.Here’s how you do it:Sign up for a Netvibes accountClick the big green “Add content” button in the upper left of the screenIn the sub navigation click “Essential widgets.”On the lower right-hand side of boxes that appear, you’ll see a button called “Web page.”Enter your search page results URL in the text-entry box that appears (not the original URL, so instead of “http://search.twitter.com” you paste “http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Hong+Kong+Phooey”) Many results pages, like the example above, also offer the RSS version of the search results. In this case, you’ll want to substitute clicking the “Add a feed” button for step two. Then rinse and repeat for all the services available to search out your brand mentions. Your computer and productivity will thank you. I have to say, this isn’t an original idea by me. Sadly, I can’t remember where I read this technique originally to attribute it, but it’s quite useful.This is the kind of dashboard you could build with Netvibes within an hour if you so desire – this is a Dashboard created by Duct Tape Marketing.“…I quickly set something up on Netvibes (you could do this in iGoogle, MyYahoo, Pageflakes too) that would allow me to track various Google Alerts, twitter searches, Boardtracker searches and backtype searches along with my own Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn activity. There are lots of pre-build widget for things like twitter, but pretty much anything with an RSS feed can be added to the page. Netvibes is easy to work with and this might be a nice way to keep it all front and center.”This kind of Dashboard works for an individual or small brand – it’s free and fast to set up. Note – there are no alerts here but this is easy enough to set up in Google Alerts if needed.
2. Using Addictomatic for a Social Media DashboardAddictomatic replaces NetVibes – it’s actually a one step NetVibes without the work of picking feeds – Addictomatic does it for you and you can view your custom Addictomatic page whenever you want – but it’s not private page – so whatever your seeing – someone else can, too.According to Thomas TrumbleAddictomatic is a nice little tool that I found out about the other day.  It’s a social media search aggregator that produces a custom webpage of the results and is great for a quick review of mentions of a term that you input across a variety of social media site.   For example, I did a vanity search for myself and turned up my name on Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, Bloglines and Wordpress. Addictomatic is not a social media account finder like Spokeo, so it doesn’t turn up all of the media that I am producing and posting. Addictomatic aggregates mentions of your query across social media sites, in this case my name, not the footprint of my profiles across social media sites.  For a quick review of social media buzz, this is a great tool, but it doesn’t provide enough depth to make it a tool for much more than that.  Use it for snapshots, but look to other more robust tools for real social media listening and measurement. Notice that Thomas mentions Addictomatic lacks depth – you get what you pay for – this is a nice tool for a simple monitoring solution a small business or individual might want to perform – but is not useful more much else (but there is a place for this “free” social media aggregation in small organizations and non-profits that cannot afford much else).Visualizing what you might measure in a Social Media Dashboard you build yourselfIf you want to get a handle on to monitor – take a look at this diagram above. Whatever you build via NetVibes or other methods, keep in mind you have a vast and ever changing landscape to monitor.
3. Tattler – Build your own” open sourced” Social Monitoring Platform  I investigated TattlerTattler main screenWe found Tattler so difficult and un-user friendly that it would take a true enthusiast of this tool to get anything useful out of it – but once you get used to it – its possible Tattler could, on the face of it, replace Radian6, Alterian or other such Self Serve platform.However, since Tattler is open sourced – meaning that the developer communities self develops a platform, no one is paid to do this, it’s all volunteer work – it’s not clear how often or well Tattler is, could or will be maintained – and who would you go to when you have a problem with the platform?Also, the bar is constantly being raised in Social Media – last year “monitoring” conversations in Social Media was no so common and people weren’t sure what was good monitoring vs. not so good monitoring … self serve and high end Social Media tools are evolving past simply monitoring conversations to acting on them. As a result, much cheaper platforms such as ViralHeat.com have evolved that are on par or superior to Tattler at little or no cost – making the effort of supporting your own Drupal installation of Tattler not really worth the effort for most people. In this case, there is too much complexities with what is essentially become a “commodity” – monitoring online data.Tattler is probably more work than anything you would it get out of it (all Drupal patches need to be updated and you must run Tattler on your own server) – but it’s possible that some organizations could leverage a tool like Tattler – but I think Tattler is more suitable for a more technical audience.
4. Note: the post this information came from was as Marty Weintraub’s Reputation Monitoring Dashboard (see http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/03/16/how-to-build-a-reputation-monitoring-dashboard/)
5. Refer to http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/social-media-monitoring.html as the original source of this information which I adapted for this presentation.