How To: Catch Every Mention of Your Product

by Anthony Feint on May 31, 2009

You would think that the internet moves too fast and has to much data to catch every mention of your product. But, thanks to great tools like FriendFeed, Twitter and Google Alerts its now possible.

Plus you will be able to do it, without being overwhelmed with information.

There are also plenty of tools which charge a small fortune to small businesses to corporations, that will do the same job as the free tools I have listed below (but perhaps with a prettier interface):

Step 1: Grab the Feeds

Twitter Search – do a search for your product name on Twitter search and then grab the related rss feed. For Task.fm I used the terms “task.fm”, “taskfm”, “task fm” and “www.task.fm”.
Delicious – Do the same on Delicious. The search terms should be your website’s title as this is what the links show up as.
Google News – Do a search for you product and then save the RSS feed
Google Blog Search – Do the same for Google news

Step 2: Import feeds into a FriendFeed Room

FriendFeed is a great way of aggregating a large stream of information. Unlike an RSS reader, you won’t be overwhelmed by “unread items” and you can easily skip past unwanted items.

Create your own FriendFeed room just for tracking your product mentions. Add all of the rss feeds to the room. When something new comes in, it will show up in your feed.

I also have created a saved search on FriendFeed for the term “task.fm” – which I check all the time as it catches a lot of what my room misses (such as stumbleupon entries).

If your “mention” room is private like mine, you can leave comments or notes. Great for letting others in your team know you’ve responded to a comment, or for leaving notes about the author.

Step 3: Google Alerts

FriendFeed still may miss some mentions. So setup a Google Alert for your product name. This will email you when Google indexes a new page related to your term. Make sure you set the “as it happens” option so that you can respond right away.

Taking It Further

You can use this same method for not only tracking mentions of your product, but also for finding potential new leads. For example, If you were mention “gtd” (getting things done) “to-do list app”, “sms reminders” etc. It will show up in a special FriendFeed room I created. 90% of the mentions of these terms I ignore, but there are a few which I will go out and actively respond to. btw. Responding doesn’t always mean plugging your product!

Photo Credit – Michael Marlatt

Tagged as: marketing, Startups, tips

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Alex Schleber May 31, 2009 at 9:07 pm

Great, concise post. Just posted it to Twitter via my FriendFeed “likes”..

I would add that you can actually grab the Google Alerts as an RSS Feed as well once the individual keyword set-up is created, which you can then import into the same FriendFeed room you describe under Step 2. ( I actually just added this to one of my own “listening post” FF rooms.)

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Anthony Feint June 3, 2009 at 7:17 pm: sweet. i didn’t know you could grab an rss feed for Google alerts. This will certainly clean up my inbox

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Dean May 31, 2009 at 11:26 pm

Nice post Anthony, you nailed it.

@Alex Schleber you took the words out of my mouth. Getting Google alerts piped into Friendfeed is an awesome options 6 months ago I might have suggested Google Reader but I rarely use that now Friendfeed has become my control panel. Friendfeed’s filtering and UI make it much less work. Especially in comparison to email.

Rich Schefren has a Reputation Manager which adds a couple of services to the list http://www.strategicprofits.com/tools/reputation-monitor/ (You could get the opml file and copy the searches into friendfeed).

Another tool worth a mention is the Yahoo Pipes mashup Social Media Firehose http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose (which can be piped into Friendfeed)

You can see where this is going!

Lastly there could be some value in this video by Mike Elliot about using Friendfeed as a search tool http://deepfriendfeed.tumblr.com/post/115820426/is-friendfeed-the-best-content-search-tool-on-the-web

Thanks for your thoughts gents.

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