Monitoring the Blogosphere

I reread part of David Mermann Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing & PR a few days back and he sums up beautifully some of the key steps we have to take in building towards the launch of our corporate blog, and I paraphrase slightly:

• Monitor what millions of people are saying about...the market you sell into, your organization and its products.
• Participate in those conversations by commenting on other people's blogs.
• Begin and shape those conversations by creating and writing your own blog.

So what is the best way of monitoring all the blogs that might mention NetIQ, one of our products, an area we operate within or the points of pain we help address? How will we know when Bernardo Sanchez, .docstoc, or when Anna Rocha submits a SCM 5.7 piece to Digg.com?

Google News is already being used to feed content into our sales force information source, but I found that a little restrictive as it does not provide the depth of blog coverage I felt we needed. I also didn't want to establish feeds from each of the sites that should be monitored. That would put me at the receiving end of multiple fire hoses.

Turns out that Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer blog was at the receiving end of some great work Kingsley Joseph of Salesforce's was doing with Yahoo Pipes to get on top of their online buzz. Anyone familiar with UNIX pipes will understand how this works, but it allows the construction of a single feed from sites like Techmeme, Technorati, and Digg.

After cloning Kingsley's work, which worked great, I have started building my own basic pipe (first draft pictured here) in an effort to more effectively cleanse the results of blog spam. It is a work in progress, but we should be able to start reaching and commenting on relevant blogs very soon.