Buzz Monitoring for Marketers: Community Engagement as a Conversation Monitoring Strategy

As I was preparing for the Webinar I gave last week, I began thinking about how overwhelming monitoring the online conversation can be. After all, what you really have are chunks of content flying around the Web, taking any number of increasingly convoluted paths. For example, a blog post can be propagated via RSS to Facebook, then published as a note in the news feed. And at each step of the process, these chunks of content can start conversations. Add all the possible permutations into te mix and you begin to realize how very challenging online conversations are to track.

If all you do is track keywords or monitor the top bloggers in the space via RSS, you may be missing out on the growing conversation happening inside walled gardens like Facebook or on community news sites like Digg.

So in my presentation, I proposed an idea that’s worth exploring: follow individual attention streams rather than keywords.  Here’s how you do it:

1. Take that list of prominent bloggers that you were planning to e-mail about your latest product.
2. Search for each one of them here, here and here add them to your list of friends with the intent that you will follow what they’re interested in and participate in the conversations they find interesting.
3. Meet and follow other people whose names you see repeatedly mentioned or involved in conversations that matter to your area of expertise.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 as needed.

The point of this exercise is that the passionate, intelligent people in your space are aware of the best conversations. They tend to be friends, or at least online acquaintances with other people who are having those conversations. If you take this approach to following the conversation, you’ll not only monitor the buzz effectively, you’ll also meet and make friends with all those influential people you want to reach out to.

Yes, this approach is a lot more cumbersome and time consuming than typing a few keywords into Technorati and monitoring the result in your Google Reader, but you get out of it what you put in.

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