My (FREE) iGoogle Brand Monitoring Dashboard

Ok, as much as I would LOVE to use some fancy brand monitoring software (I will not name names) I just don't have the budget for it. I'm using Google Analytics for stats now for crying out loud.

So, friends, let me introduce you to the free, easy to set up, automatically updating brand monitoring dashboard that I created with iGoogle and a slew of RSS feeds.

Here's a screenshot:


Noooo, I can't enlarge it. Because I know there are moles out there reading my blog, which is why I have this damn thing in the first place. TROLLS! I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE!

But what I can do is tell you how I set it up so you can have one too. It's not as complicated as it looks!

There are 5 categories on our dashboard:

• Brand - mentions of your name, including acronyms, misspellings, etc
• Current - issues that people are talking about that involve you right now
• Detractors - people you know don't like you but talk about you
• Competition - people in the same space as you
• Staff - prominent people in your org, like your CEO
  

And we monitor mentions of our brand on the following places:

• Google Alerts - I hope you know what they are and are already using them!
• Filtrbox - a paid monitoring service to make sure we catch everything
• Tweetmeme - tells you the most popular tweets about a subject
• Twitter Search - shows tweets containing a certain keyword (we don't use this anymore because we use Tweetdeck separately)
• Technorati - shows blogs that mention certain keywords
• Blogpulse - another blog monitoring tool
• Digg - shows most popular articles on the web
• Boardreader - shows forum posts by keyword
  

It's important to monitor all of these things. Nonprofits... all brands for that matter... cannot afford not to monitor their brand this day in age, of constant communication via endless online channels.

Here's how to get started:

1. Start with a blank iGoogle page.
2. Choose the 3 column layout.
3. Open a new browser window. Do a search on Technorati for your org name. You'll see a "subscribe" link. Click on it.

4. A window in Google Reader should open. Copy the feed URL in the top left corner.


5. Go back to iGoogle, and click on add stuff > add feed or gadget.
6. Paste the URL into the box and save.
7. You'll be taken back to your iGoogle page, where you should see a new box with the content from Technorati mentioning your org name.
8. Repeat these steps for each site, then each tab.

Our dashboard has anything with our acronym in the first column and anything with our name in the second column. The third column has important content from the org like our blog, our Twitter feed, and our press releases RSS feed. This acts as a resource for the people who view the dashboard… they see what people are talking about, and what we (as an org) are talking about, side-by-side.

Another great thing about this is you can "star" an individual item so that you know you've read it. Works really well when you've got hundreds of new items to review.

Hope that helps some of you and good luck!