How to monitor anything…

Using a few simple online resources we’re going to track anything on the web over time.

What you’ll need to get going:

1. A Google account. We’re going to be using Google alerts for this tutorial
2. A SWM account. It’s still in beta but you should be able to get an account without too much fuss…

Once you have both of the above we are ready to proceed.

First things first. Log into the Google Alerts page. It’s important that you log in, you can set up an alert without logging in but you won’t get the “feed” option.

In the box titled “Create a Google Alert” enter your search term, you can use standard Google notation for searches. We’ll use “coke” for now.

In the “type” drop down box leave it as “comprehensive” (although we do recommend playing with this, you could set up different alerts based on the same keyword and just change this parameter to see what happens)

In the “Deliver to” drop down box, change it to “feed”, this is the magic part for us… This will also stop the “How often” dropdown from being selectable.

Then create your alert. Now, manage your alerts by clicking the “click here to manage your alerts” link. You’ll now have access to your RSS feeds, and you can copy the URL’s. You can subscribe to this in your favourite feedreader and get daily updates on your chosen search…

See what’s new and happening over periods of time

For actually tracking over time we need Simple Web Management (SWM). So log into your account and install the “RSS monitor”, you can do it for a client’s account or just on your own.

Add a new search, set the interval to “Every 20 minutes”, the “Human-readable decription” is just a grand name for a title, we’ll put in “Coke” for this and paste our RSS feed URL and click “Add/Edit Search”. Make sure that the feed url has HTTP:// instead of feed:// at the beginning.

All being well, you should get a box with an empty graph. Click the “View Results” link, it’s pretty unlikely that there will be results straight away, but give it a while. Google Alerts itself takes a while to warm up, you may need to log out and come back in a bit. Once it starts though, it’s consistent.

If you’ve made a mistake, you need to delete the search in SWM and add it again. Editing of a search is not possible as editing a search would degrade its integrity.

The Results

As the results start to roll in, depending on your search term, you will want to filter your data by time, which you can do just by dragging a range over the graph. You can also “favourite” specific posts for later, which is really handy if you’re writing a report for a client.

I’m so excited about the cool stuff we could do with this. Using the power of Google you can monitor Forums, ebay, blogs, the possibilities are endless. What about Yahoo Pipes? You could do some cool stuff there as well..

Tagged as: Google, monitoring, social, social media, swm