Take one part open source Web browser (Firefox) – add a tab manager – blend in social search engines like Google Blog search – combine with a browser plug-in that generates tag clouds – and what do you get?
A cheap and easy way to monitor social media buzz.
If you or your client has money for fancy social media monitoring dashboards, by all means go for it. In the meanwhile, the above recipe can help you keep your fingers on the pulse of the buzz in your space
- The browser in this example is Firefox
- Twitter and Google blog search engines were used
- The tab manager makes it possible to organize groups of browser sessions – each tab can include several instances of Google or Twitter searches tuned for various search phrases
- The tag cloud generator shows which words are popping for each search phrase via a cloud at the top of the search results.
I wrote more about this in my post on Social Fluency yesterday, including the specifics about the tag cloud generator that was used
