Same monitoring tools, new look, more functionality.

I’ve always been a fan of apps that try to present complex information in a simple manner. When it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very easy to get overloaded with information. Back in the fall I posted up my Social Media Monitoring – Top 10 Tools presentation onto slideshare. To my surprise, it immediately made it to the front page and has since had almost 6000 views and over 750 downloads. Many of the tools have since been updated and a plethora of new ones have seen the light of day. Here are some basic ones that have since been updated quite a bit:

Facebook Lexicon (new edition)

Use this tool to gauge the conversation occurring within Facebook. The new version includes demographic, psychographic and geographic data.

TwitScoop

This is a tool that let’s you observe the aggregate live discussion on Twitter in real-time (in the form of a tag cloud). I’d be surprised if every single modern news outlet in the world right now isn’t listening in on this. Variations of this tool allow you to form tag clouds of specific groups of people.

Technorati Blog Search Graph

While not necessarily the best tool out there for monitoring blogosphere discussion, where Technorati really comes in handy for me is with it’s updated graph monitoring feature that allows you to track various keywords/keyphrases. It’s best used as a visual performance benchmark when you are trying to increase discussion levels in the blogosphere on a particular topic within a specified period of time.

Let me know if you know of any other old tools out there that have recently gotten a makeover!

Social Media Monitoring – 10 Free Tools

Last week I had the privilege of presenting my third session at the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS) - Armchair Discussion Series. This time, the topic was Social Media Monitoring – 10 Free Tools For Finding Out What People Are Saying About Your Organization. I chose to present this as a follow up to my “Social Media 101″ and “Social Media & The Canadian Government” topics. I figured it was time to give people some hands-on examples of how to “listen” to the social media “conversations” occurring all around them. More importantly, I wanted to show public servants that they can use these tools right away, for free! I have posted up the presentation on SlideShare (embedded below) and provided the URL’s to each tool that was demonstrated live during the session. Note that even though I have listed ten tools, they are not necessarily in order. I didn’t want to provide a “Top 10″ list since at the end of the day, the best tools depend on what the objectives are. Without knowing these, only broad suggestions can be provided. That being said, I did point out during the presentation that Google Reader (for aggregating content) and Twitter Advanced Search (for real time discussion monitoring) are my two personal favourites. Which monitoring tools do you swear by?

Who’s blogging and what the heck are they blogging about?

Ok, the latest blogging statistics are finally in. In it’s new report on The State of the Blogosphere, Technorati reveals the following breakdown of blogs topics. Note that the average amount of topics per blogger is 5.

You can overlay this data with worldwide statistics on blog usage, which Universal McCann (March 2008) found to be as follows:

• 184 million worldwide users have started a blog
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

I found some of the demographic statistics to be particularly interesting. The most active blogging age group is 25-34 and 66% of the world’s bloggers are apparently male.

Be sure to read the full Tecnorati findings here. Is anybody else surprised at the male:female ratio?