The 5 'Mention types' in Social Media Monitoring

Executing SMM for the strategising (as discussed in the last weeks post) is not a simple and one time activity. It requires a deep knowledge of all the "Mention types" that constitute the UGC(User Generated Content) and understanding of how to prioritise and categorise then. I am trying to put them in the simplest possible way to understand and also some means of 'Monitoring' the same.

News
Media News can be best tracked on news.google.com. It works like search where you can enter your company name, sort the results by date published and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You can get RSS updates of any news items that mention you or your products.

Blogs
http://www.ysearchblog.com/ from yahoo and http://blogsearch.google.com/ help you find the stories that mentions you or your products. You can get alerts to matching stories via email or RSS. Blog search will not miss out on mentions that would be difficult to find in the news and ordinary search.

Tracking blog-posts often does not reveal the full conversations. The blog post might be positive, but those leaving comments could attack your reputation. Services such as Bloppy (http://www.bloppy.info/), Commentful(http://www.commentful.blogflux.com/), co.mments.com (http://www.co.mments.com/), Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), BackType(http://www.backtype.com/) track the comments left on blogs. You can search for your brand and subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates. Blogpulse’s conversation tracker is a tool to track who’s linking to the blog post about you or your products.

A step ahead in this process is to not only track the 'news' or 'Blogs' but also the ones that becomes 'popular'. Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon will help you keep a track through search for stories that match you or your products. You can subscribe to the resulting RSS feed and you’ll know about any story on these sites mentions you or your products–or your rivals.

Bookmarks
Thanks to online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us(http://www.delicious.com/), Diigo(http://www.Diigo.com/), Furl(http://www.furl.net/), Mister Wong(http://Mister-Wong.com/ is Europes no.1 service) and Blinklist(http://www.blinklist.com/ , I use blinklist ever since i started bookmarking) many people are sharing their bookmarks online. subscribing to the RSS feeds from such services makes it easy to track whenever someone bookmarks a web page that includes mention of you or your products.

Social Media News
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) is one of the best options for tracking social media sites. It offers Real-time search engine for blogs that tracks what is current and popular. It Offers the ability to search blog postings using a tag library, list your blog, and Custom RSS feeds let you get quick updates on any blog that refers to you or your products.

Forums & Message Boards
Message boards and forums not only paved the way for social networking, they still attract a lot of people to interact. Many a times the most important interactions take place in a forum discussion and if you are not keeping track of F&MBs you could miss on vital information. BoardTracker and BoardReader are two extremly good tools to monitor posts, topics, and actual forum names.

Photos, videos, Tags, Job listings and finacial mentions etc are the other "Mention types" that need to be monitored. A SMM program cannot be complete without taking care of all these.

I will publish the third part of this SMM post in a couple of days and talk about the largest UGC generators like Twitter and Facebook.