MONITOR BLOGS WITH BLOGPULSE

Like Technorati, BlogPulse is an active tool for monitoring blogs and, also like Technorati, it is free. Among the newest entries to the blog monitoring field, BlogPulse is run by Intelliseek, one of the world’s foremost business and consumer intelligence companies. BlogPulse’s main feature set centers around trend analysis. Blog- Pulse is adding new features at an exciting rate, and you could definitely do worse than subscribing to the Intelliseek blog (www .intelliseek.com/blog) or the BlogPulse blog.

BlogPulse’s trend analysis is incredibly useful because it goes beyond the “point in time” figures provided by Technorati. Technorati’s greatest weakness is that while you can tell from memory if your stats are growing, you don’t have historical context for how quickly your links are growing as a trend. BlogPulse provides this information, as well as a large variety of other trend-based figures. As an added bonus, the graphs are pretty enough to include in any presentation, as shown in the visibility chart provided for CNN .com. We’ll examine several of BlogPulse’s tools and discuss how to take advantage of the information they provide, including the following:

• Link Search

• Comparative Search

• Variable Timeframe Search

• Conversation Tracker

• Industry Trends

Link searching returns a list of recent links back to the specified blog or website. Because BlogPulse tracks roughly 10 percent more blogs than Technorati, this figure will often be higher than Technorati’s estimates.

When performing link searches, a variety of options is at your disposal. You can search competitors, assign labels (for clearer searching), and even modify the date range if you are hoping to compare who is talking about what in a given time period for example, you could determine which news service had the most popular coverage of a particular event. The graph information provided by BlogPulse is generally noted as a percentage of overall blog posts for that period, as opposed to a specific number of links. Here are a few examples of uses for this type of information:

• Comparing your historic visibility to a competitor’s

• Tracking conversation about your company

• Tracking mentions of your company after a crisis

• Comparing responses to your press releases to responses on your blog

BlogPulse Profiles

BlogPulse recently extended its offerings to include BlogPulse Profiles (www.blogpulse.com/profile). A profile of your blog provides an overall rundown of important things to know: how popular it is, how many links it contains, what other blogs talk about similar things (great for reaching out into the blogging community), and a wealth of other information. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d need to view daily monthly is more appropriate but it proves that lots of information is contained within each BlogPulse profile. Not only is it a great tool for tracking your blog, but because profiles are public, you can also track competitors’ blogs or websites.

Track the Conversation Another major feature of BlogPulse is the Conversation Tracker. This tool allows you to see how the blogosphere is responding to a specific event or a specific post. Overall, BlogPulse’s service is ideal at measuring reaction to an event, visualizing linking trends, and comparing individual blogs, websites, or pages for popularity and visibility. BlogPulse provides a level of context that the other search and trend services don’t allow one that your company should take distinct advantage of.

PUBSUB: TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW

While active searching is helpful, the problem with active searching is that it requires that you go out and get the information. You might find it more helpful if the information simply came to you instead of you having to go find it. This is where passive searching comes into play. Passive searching provides much the same results provided by Technorati, but it provides them as a feed to which you can subscribe. Every time a new link (or whatever you’re looking for) is found, the feed is updated so that you get up-to-the minute results for the particular issues that interest you. The fastest, most popular, and most versatile passive search engine in the world is PubSub.

PubSub allows you to focus on one or more areas of interest, including press releases and newsgroup posts, as well as the all important weblog entries. If we do a search for CNN, we get a very different type of response from PubSub. Unlike other search services, PubSub doesn’t actually display search results. This is because PubSub isn’t designed to search the past it’s designed to search the future. PubSub’s database grows by thousands of entries every minute and, as it does, PubSub notifies you by updating your personal feed. Your Subscription Stack, is a list of the items for which you are searching, the results of which will be displayed in your feed reader, thanks to your own personal feed. You could add other terms here, such as BBC News, Fox News, ABC News, and so on. You could also search for specific products, phrases, or other specific information. There is no search too small for PubSub to track for you. After you have created your Subscription Stack, simply subscribe to the feed and wait. As PubSub finds new items related to your queries, it will notify you by updating the feed. You can use this information in a variety of ways.

Most important, though, is that this information allows you to be able to respond to issues in a timely manner. If you find out within 20 minutes that a customer is having issues getting your product to work, it prepares you to respond to that issue more effectively than if the first time you hear about it is in The New York Times. By the time an issue hits the wider blogosphere, you are already in crisis prevention mode. Subscribing to PubSub feeds means you can find out about issues faster than most bloggers, and it means you can take care of issues before they become crises. SUGGESTED PUBSUB SEARCHES You can use PubSub in a variety of ways. Here is a list of some valuable search ideas:

• Your company name

• Your main products

• Your competitor’s names

• I love followed by your company name

• I hate followed by your company name

• Similar I love and I hate searches for your main products, your competitors, and your competitor’s products