People are using the Internet to talk about your brand and your products – are you listening? Do you know how to listen?  Listening is easier then you think, and you don’t have to buy an expensive monitoring tool to do it, either.

Want to know what people are saying about you on Twitter?  Facebook?  Blogs?  Forums?  No problem.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to set up the ultimate listening station using Google Reader, a free tool.

The Setup

For this hypothetical example, we’ll be setting up a listening station for the New England Patriots, since lots of people like to talk about the Pats online.

1. Sign up for a Google Reader account (this may require signing up for a Google account, if you don’t already have one)

Your Brand New Google Reader Account

2. Set up Google Alerts for relevant keywords.  Choose the comprehensive search, and set the delivery option to feed.  Click create alert, and then on the following screen, click view in Google Reader.  You should now be subscribed to your Google Alert in your Google Reader.  Repeat as necessary.

Note: you may experience some overlap between your Google Alerts and the other feeds we’ll set up below.  This is OK.

Google Alerts Set-Up

3. Go to Twitter Search.  Run a search for a relevant keyword term, like “New England Patriots”.  Click on feed for this query on the right hand side of the screen.  Add to your Google Reader account.  Is your search for a particular geographic area?  Use Twitter’s Advanced Search to narrow your search by geographic area.  Repeat as necessary.

Twitter Search Results

4. Facebook has a search feature, but does not allow you to subscribe to searches via RSS.  But there is another option.  Go to Social Mention and select Facebook by clicking on the select social media sources option underneath the search box.  Run your search and subscribe by clicking on the RSS feed icon on the right hand side of the search results screen.  Add to your reader account.  Repeat as necessary.

Selecting Facebook on Social Mention

RSS Subscription Option

5. What about forums?  There’s probably a lot of discussion about the Patriots on sports forums, right?  Go to BoardReader, run a search for your target query.  On the search results screen, hover over the show tools link, and select RSS.  Add to your reader account.  Repeat as necessary.

Note: at the time of this post, both BoardReader and BoardTracker were having technical difficulties, and I was unable to get RSS subscriptions to work.  The above info is how you would set it up if it were working correctly.

Forum Search

RSS Subscription Icon for BoardReader

6. Now for the blogs.  Several options exist for searching blog posts.  Google Blog Search and IceRocket can both get the job done.  For this tutorial I’m going to use Social Mention again.  Follow the same process as you did for step #4.  Only this time, select the blogs option to the right of the search box.  Subscribe to the results via RSS, and add to your Google Reader account.  Repeat as necessary.

7. YouTube.  There’s probably a lot of activity on YouTube for New England Patriots clips.  Go to YouTube.  Search for your relevant keyword term.  On the results page, click on the RSS icon in your browser’s address bar.  Add to Google Reader, repeat as necessary.

YouTube Search

8. Flickr.  At this point in time, Flickr does not allow you to subscribe to keyword searches.  So we must turn to Social Mention once more.  Follow the same steps as you did on step #4, only this time, select Flickr instead of Facebook.  Subscribe to the RSS feed on Google Reader.  Repeat as necessary.

Searching Flickr Through Social Mention

9. Any other unmentioned website or media platform.  Go to the site.  Run a search for a target keyword phrase.  Look for RSS subscribe options.  If an option does not exist, check a website like Social Mention.

Organize Your Findings

By now, you should have several feeds set up for a variety of searches.  Here’s how to organize your Google Reader account for easy reading.

1. Go to Google Reader.

2. Click on settings.

3. Then click on Google Reader settings.

4. Click on the subscriptions tab.

5. Start organizing your feeds into folders, in this example, I’ll group feeds into folders by keyword.  You could also group by medium, or if you do this for multiple clients – by client.

Google Reader Subscription Settings

6. When you’re done, your reader might look something like the picture below.

Organized Google Reader Account

And that’s it!  You’re now set up to monitor your brand or business across a variety of popular platforms and it’s all free.

Got any questions?  Leave them in the comments!

Photo Credit

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I came across an interesting dilemma the other day.  I was asked to create an optimization report for a client where little to no measurable search demand existed for the service being sold by the website.  Typically, in these situations all optimization is based off of keyword research done through Wordtracker or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool, which shows a quantifiable number of searches per keyword phrase.  This makes it easy to determine the demand for a particular phrase, and thus, an entire website.  So what is an SEO to do when it seems as if no search demand exists?

Get creative, of course!

There are a couple of different tactics you can take when attempting to optimize a site that doesn’t appear to have search demand.  The first is a branding based approach.  Depending on the type of site or service your optimizing for, this can be a good tactic.  Instead of optimizing for a commodity or informational based search, you’d be hoping to manufacture a search market through other tactics like social media or traditional advertising.  The theory is that as consumers learn about your brand, they’ll begin searching for you by name – so it would pay to be optimized for that.

A great example of this currently is Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter Out service.  There is no search demand for the service that Mr. Shankman currently provides – a way for journalists to connect with sources.  However, Shankman has done a fantastic job marketing the service through other channels, and has created a search market for his branded terms.

You can see on his website that he optimizes for three phrases, “Peter Shankman”, “HARO” and “Help A Reporter Out”.  A searcher could use any of those three terms to find his website.

A second tactic, and one that may work out just fine is to simply guess.  Google is known for stating that up to 25% of daily searches have never been searched for before.  That’s a powerful statistic.  Because of the sheer volume of long tail and new searches that are conducted daily, it’s impossible to know for sure exactly what people are searching for.  So, as an SEO you should take your best guess, and optimize for long tail terms that are consistently searched for.  Terms like “top”, “best”, “professional”, “company”, “service”, and any localized terms are good places to start.  Beyond that, try product or service terms or any phrases that might describe a particular need.  This tactic does require that you spend extra time testing and measuring the performance of your target keyword phrases.  You’ll need to adjust consistently overtime to get the right combination of phrases for your website.

How would you optimize a website with no measurable search demand?

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