Putting Your Ear To The Digital Rail

[This will be the first part of a new series of blog posts that I'm tagging as "digital101," posts designed to help spread some interactive street smarts to folks that follow me on a regular basis. Some topics will be pretty basic while others, I hope, will appeal to the more digitally savvy out there. Feel free to drop a line if you have comments or requests.]

In my self-appointed role as a digital evangelist of sorts, I often find myself trying to distill the massive scale of what constitutes digital and interactive marketing into bite-sized (byte-sized?) chunks for my co-workers and clients. It’s easy to be intimidated by the scope of the World Wide Web and the ever-growing numbers and influence of the global online audience. We throw around numbers with lots of zeros and try to make the data more digestible by slugging in a percentage or some other sort of qualifier. Regardless, it doesn’t change the incredible immensity of our ever-growing digital ecosystem. Yet while numbers and populations are all well and good, the more pertinent and pressing question should always be this: what are they saying?

There are a number of online monitoring tools out there. Programs using such tools as VML’s SEER, Spiral 16’sSpark or Social Radar from Infegy (just to name a few) all have a cost of entry for their services that can range from a few thousand dollars for basic programs to hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most sophisticated monitoring and analysis services available. But did you know that you could put your ear to the virtual rail right now from the comfort of your own desktop? Here are two quick options for you, perhaps ones that you might already know about but should dig into further.

Google Alerts

Equal to Microsoft and Apple in terms of defining the digital curve rather than being simply defined by it, Google has an incredibly insatiable drive in developing services and platforms that are redefining the Web and how we use it. (Heard of Android, anyone?) Google Alerts is a completely free service that allows users to be notified via e-mail of the “latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.”

Basically, you set up your search term, designate the type of alert you want so sign up for, set how often you want to be notified and you’re off. For example, let’s say you want to keep tabs on when a client’s brand is mentioned in blogs as it happens. No problem. Curious about what’s hitting the newswire on a weekly basis about your client’s company? Easy. Want to be kept up-to-date every time your agency’s name appears on the Web? Just a few clicks and you’re off.

While you can think of Google Alerts as a powerful little assistant that can help cut through the clutter, know that it has its limitations: garbage in, garbage out. If you have too broad of a query phrase, you’ll still be left wading through tons of useless info. A quick read through the FAQs and some experimentation with Google’s Advanced Search options (click here for general advance search on Google and here for Advanced News Search options) and you should be able to lock into the syntax you’ll need to construct an efficient alert.

You know, I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time before Google will be able to alert me about the contents of my cat’s litter box.

Google Reader

So let’s say you’ve been watching your alerts with regularity and you’ve started to notice nodes of conversations clustering around specific sites or blogs. Time to bring in Google Reader. Google Reader is an RSS aggregator, able to organize multiple site feeds into a handy, single application. And besides constantly checking your favorite sites, it will also allow you to easily share items with friends, co-workers and clients.

So how does it work? Most news sites and blog sites will have an RSS feed. (If you want the technical details, read up about RSS on Wiki) as a start. Not necessary, but interesting stuff.) That RSS feed is updated regularly on most sites when new content is published to the site, rendering that content portable and able to be ported into a number of different applications, like widgets, aggregators or even displayed on other Web sites.

Gather up the feed URLs for the mini-ecosystem you’ve identified via Google Alerts and start plugging those into your Google Reader and you’re off and running. Along the way, you may also find feeds in interesting places. For instance, if you go to Twitter’s search engine, plug in a search term (try a client’s brand name or the brand name of their closest competitor), you’ll see that on the results page in the upper right hand corner a link that reads “Feed for this query.” You can plug that feed into your Google Reader and voila! Instant Twitter monitoring system!

Toes In The Water 

So much about the world of digital can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Part of the natural evolution of information systems like the internet will be the rise and increasing sophistication of organizational tools that will be specifically designed to make sense of the madness. The trick for advertising professionals is to be on the lookout for these tools and be savvy enough to know when they can be used for our benefit … and for the benefit of our clients. After all, we like to pride ourselves as being on the front lines of their business. When it comes to gathering info and intelligence, being the first to know when something pops in our client’s world and being able to not only inform them of the conversation or concern but help shape that response, well, that’s a powerful position from which to work.