Business Blog Toolbox: Listening

By on June 30, 2006 in Blogging, Conversations, Cool Tools, Marketing, RSS Feeds with 3 Comments

Before a business starts publishing a blog, they should listen to the conversations and hone their blog-tracking muscles. Here are the tools I recommend for the listening role of business blogging.

Each of these tools is free if you use them, costly to your business if you don’t.

  1. Feed Aggregator: GreatNews – Why is a feed aggregator listed first? Because the first step a business should take when engaging in the conversation is the role of listening. Of all the choices of feed readers available, GreatNews has the best support, most features – and most importantly to business leaders, can be synced with Bloglines. Among the best features are the Label This, Email This and importing/exporting OPML files into Grazr.
  2. Blog Tracking: Technorati – Again, listening before talking in the conversations. Technorati’s multiple search functions (by word, by post, by blog, explore) make it easy to separate signal from noise. Watchlists make it easy to track what’s being said about you, your company, your clients, your industry. Most importantly, the searches can be tracked via feed into your GreatNews aggregator.
  3. Conversation Tracking: co.mments.com – One of two comment tracking tools I use, this one allows me to track a conversation whether I’m involved or not. By plugging the feed into my aggregator, I instantly know what’s being added by newcomers. (Note: GreatNews also has a Track Comments feature-but I haven’t used this yet. If you have, let us know how well it works.)

If you’re considering (or already) publishing a business blog, these tools are a must. By using them they will allow you to:

  • Find your audience
  • Listen to what’s being said
  • Separate Signal vs Noise
  • Engage in the conversation
  • Differentiate: your audience AND your blog

There are four tools I recommend for publishing a blog, and we’ll cover that later today.

technorati tags: co.mments

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  • http://www.myblogspan.com/ Kelly

    One of the many ways to save time as a designer is to have a toolbox. That is, a collection of design files to help you get started or to reference when designing. These files might be templates, layer styles, swatch pallets, code snippets etc.,

  • http://www.jmsstrategies.com/ John, Employee Training

    Must say most helpful one I have read today. Thanks for sharing the info. Not only great tools, great time savers too.

  • http://www.cymphonix.com/ApplicationPrioritization.html application control

    Conversation is one of the base of business and I like this post which having different types of tracking tricks.Its very informative and well advisable also.Thanks for the creative one.

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