Listening tools on the cheap

It looks like a category has emerged while my head was turned.  Analysts are now talking about ‘listening tools.’  Forrester recently ranked Radian6 and Nielsen as two of the top two tools that money can buy.    This has been a very confusing area for quite a while.   No one tool really did the job.  No one tool really still does the job as far as I can see.  Some cost a lot.  Many are still free or low cost.  Seems like you can do at least half the job for free.

Problem is, if you don’t have deep pockets what do you invest in?  Sure you can use Google search or alerts and the like but you really do need some form of automation to be able to get your job done professionally.

Here are some that I like and use regularly.

Yahoo Pipes (or xFruits).  I love this tool as the single best way to combine RSS feeds and sort and filter them all together and output a combined feed.  It really is very undervalued, both by Yahoo and the world in general.  I’m guessing it simply looks too complex to use.  In fact, it’s very easy.

Feedburner or Feedblitz (or xFruits again).  I use these tools regularly to create aggregate  emails from all my various website and RSS searches from Pipes.

Trackur.  Bills itself as Google Alerts on steroids.  I find it a little buggy but a very simple useful way of seeing a stream of search type content from blogs, twitter and facebook in one place.

Social Mention.  I find this tool very useful for a quick idea of the sentiment about a client’s brand or products. 

Alexa.com … I had forgotten all about it but Alexa really is the best for looking at who is visiting your client’s web site adn where they stand in the rankings.  I have also extensively been using HubSpot’s competitive and SEO grading tools for the same purpose which I like a lot.

Touchgraph.  I love this as a way of mapping who is linking to who for my  clients.  I treat it as ‘who do you hang out with’ on the web.  Its almost always surprising to them.

PostRank.  I have always liked their engagement ranking system which I put on all my blogs since they rolled out a new enhanced service and plugins for WordPress sites.

WordPress.  Not a listening tool obviously but it could be.  WordPress, or tools like it, are the future of the web as far as I am concerned.  By this I mean that dynamically created content-rich  websites based on blog content that engages your communities in a  conversation is mich better than playing thousands of dollars for Ad Words.   I have always gone to and fro between Drupal and WordPress.  The reality for me however us that WordPress can do just about anything I need to do, with far less complexity for a technical amateur.  And you can use it like a listening tool with the right themes which is how we created http://mymediareport.com

I use Feedburner and FeedBlitz quite a lot.

I’m also trying out Viral heat but am undecided about how good it is. And  I like the look of eCairn, Traakr and IT database but have not found a reason to use them yet.