Social media monitoring: Are you listening to what they’re saying about you?

[tweetmeme source=”pagetx”]Social media has given us another platform for communication.  There are conversations going on out there right now.  Are you listening?  For tourism businesses, this means that there are travelers out there talking about us, our destinations, our customer service, and ultimately their experiences … both positive and negative.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know what they are saying?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to respond to them?  It’s what we would do if they were standing right in front of us.  Why shouldn’t we do the same when we have conversations using social media?

Fortunately, there are as many ways to listen to social media conversations as there are to have social media conversations.  If not more.

There are some excellent companies that offer fee-based social media monitoring solutions, such as radian6 and trackur.  There are also some very good free ways to monitor social media conversations if you’re willing to do a bit more legwork.

Here are a few of the free tools available to monitor conversations on Twitter and blogs.

Twitter:

• Twitter Search – Allows you to query Twitter about specific topics.  The advanced search function provides additional search features like searching by hashtag, people, places, dates, and attitudes.  Subscribe to search queries with RSS feeds.
• #hashtags – Tracks user-created hashtags in real time.
• TweetBeep– Works very similarly to Twitter Search, but more like a Google Alert.  Sends results to E-mail rather than via RSS feeds.
• Tweet Scan – Performs keyword searches.
• Twilert– Works almost exactly like Twitter Search itself, but sends E-mail alerts rather than an RSS feed.
• twitrratr – Displays results for searches on Twitter and rates them according to sentiment – positive, negative, and neutral.

Blogs:

• Technorati– One of the best tools for monitoring your brand on blogs.  Custom RSS feeds provide quick updates when your search term is mentioned.
• Google Blog Search– Provides either E-mail alerts or RSS feeds about search terms whether the blog is listed in Google or not.
• Blogpulse’ Conversation Tracker– Tracks which blogs are linking to your blog posts.
• Blogpulse’s Trends – Tracks whether or not specific keywords are getting increasing numbers of mentions.
• Backtype– Tracks search terms mentioned in the comments of a blog, as well as tracking comments made by specific people.

Are DMOs using these tools?  What are some other useful tools to monitor the conversations happening on Twitter and in blog content and comments?

I’d love to know what you’re using and how you’re using it.

Photo courtesy of Orange_Beard.