How To Listen Online

How to Listen Online

Sheila Scarborough

Tourism Currents

What We’ll Cover

Listening services = searching for online discussions Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, Alltop Twitter Search & Facebook Insights Social Seek, Social Mention Paid services: Radian6, Techrigy

What you’re listening for (keywords) How to respond to what you hear

The 800-pound Google Gorilla

Google Alerts – the basic listening tool to have alerts emailed to you Set up an account with Google Do test searches first Then set up your Alerts At first, "As It Happens" is too frequent. Try daily.

Google Blog Search Just searches blogs

The 800-pound Google Gorilla

Always something new coming up Specialized search

Images – http://images.google.com Video – http://video.google.com Groups and forums – http://groups.google.com Google Book (and magazine) Search

http://books.google.com Google Scholar (beta) for academic works

http://scholar.google.com

Keep an eye on Bing

Microsoft + Yahoo! = money and effort poured into their search engine

I love me some Alltop.com

Alltop – an “online magazine rack” of “all the top” sites and blogs

Great for finding quality sites and blogs on numerous topics http://travel.alltop.com http://rural.alltop.com

Searching on Twitter

Search through people’s tweets for keywords http://search.twitter.com http://search.twitter.com/advanced http://search.twitter.com/operators

Hashtags – like #OTIA09 Continuous search on a dashboard

TweetDeck demo

Facebook Insights on Business/Fan Pages

Other Listening

Free services Social Seek: socialseek – download it, enter

search terms Social Mention: socialmention – enter search

terms on the site Paid services

** Radian6 Techrigy

Better searches, better listening

Know your important keywords Name of attraction/destination Name of major attraction AT your destination

Where to go for keyword ideas? Google AdWords keyword tool (most useful)

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google search-based keyword tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/#

They’re talking about my town; now what? (@SeattleMaven video)

(Photos courtesy Seattle Tourism)

Sheila Scarborough

Tourism Currents

[email protected]

@SheilaS on Twitter