This post is about building a listening machine for the web. Why would we do this, you ask?

• Because content/inbound marketing is critical to web marketing success
• Because a good content marketing strategy requires a steady stream of new ideas to keep it fed
• Because we want to keep tabs on the marketing efforts of our competitors
• Because we want to know when people are talking about the things we care about, so we can engage with them!

The process I’m going to describe fits into step three of Toby Murdock’s awesome post, How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine: generating ideas.

What You’ll Need

We’re fans of the cheap (or free) DIY approach. If you have hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, tools like Radian6 are great. For the rest of us, we can create a pretty powerful listening tool with the following:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• An RSS feed reader (we like Google Reader)
• Google Alerts

The best part is all these tools are free to use.

You’ll also need some information that you should already have from other SEO-related research:

• A list of competitors and industry news sites.
• A list of keywords you’d like to monitor or target.
• A clear objective – Keeping tabs on the industry as a whole? Monitoring competition? Listening to customers? You may be doing any or all of these things, and this will shape the list of feeds you want to track.

Using Google Reader

Following is a Google Reader feed we created for a pro photo lab:

On the left you see a number of subscriptions grouped into folders. Those subscriptions include blog feeds, Twitter searches, and Google alerts, primarily. In the main region, you’ll find the latest posts from whichever subscription (or collection of subscriptions) you’ve clicked on the left.

The most obvious use for this is to follow all your favorite blogs (or competitors) from a single place, without having to visit their websites individually. We’ll get to that in a bit.

Using Google Reader requires RSS feeds. You can find (or create) these almost anywhere. Here are a few places to start looking:

• Look for RSS icons on industry sites
• Search for “KEYWORD blog”
• Search for “top * INDUSTRY blogs” (Example) (see the section on Google search tricks below for more ideas)
• Find competitors’ blogs

Can’t find an RSS icon on a blog? Try simply adding “/feed” to the main page of the blog, or to the home page. For example, if you start with http://blog.hhcolorlab.com/, you’ll find the RSS feed at http://blog.hhcolorlab.com/feed

With each feed you find, copy the URL and go back to Google Reader. Click Subscribe and paste the RSS feed URL into the box. The new feed will be added to “Subscriptions” on the left, but will not be added to any specific folder.

Create a folder by clicking the down arrow on the right side of a feed, and clicking “New folder…” The feed will be added to the new folder. There are several ways you might organize your folders:

• By channel: Blog feeds, social channels, videos, and Q&A each get a separate folder
• By objective: One folder for listening to competitors, another for customers, and a catch-all that monitors relevant keywords

  

There’s no one right way to organize – pick what works best for your particular situation.

Cast a Wider Net with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is amazing. Simply go to www.google.com/alerts, type in a keyword, and Google will create an RSS feed or automated email that notifies you of new content matching your search.

Start by creating alerts for your company name, CEO’s name, competitors’ names, and names of your specific products. Check the preview of the alert to make sure the results are relevant. You may want to set Result Type to “Blogs.” Set the frequency to “As-it-happens,” and Deliver to “Feed.” On the following screen, click to deliver your feed(s) to Google Reader.

Google Search Tips

Google alerts are only as good as the search queries you use. Here are some tips to get you started (click each example to see it in action:

• Trial and error! This is the only way to create the right feeds.
• Try your search query with and without “quotes.” On broad searches without quotes you’ll get some very unrelated results.

  

• Try the * wildcard: “Top * photography blogs” will find all posts including “top photography blogs,” “top 100 photography blogs” and “top 10 chicago wedding photography blogs.”
• Search for all synonyms using ~: “~Professional travel ~photos” will find posts including “professional travel photos,” “pro travel photographs,” and “professional travel photography.” Note – doesn’t work with searches inside quotes.
• Try OR, AND, and group terms with (): “(“photo lab” OR “color lab” OR “photography lab”) AND (Chicago OR dallas)” will return only pages that mention Chicago or Dallas as well as one of three variations of “photo lab.”
• Weed out junk with -: ““photo printing” -desktop -inkjet -free” will return all mentions of photo printing, but will filter out references to desktop/inkjet printers and free services. This is particularly useful if your industry has keywords that overlap with other industries.

  NOTE: Use the - operator with caution. In the example above, “-free” might filter out a competitor’s announcement of a buy one get one free deal on photo printing. Keep that in mind as you test these filters.

  

• Use “-site:example.com” to filter out sites you’d like to ignore: ““photo lab” -site:yellowpages.com” will remove all results from yellowpages.com.

Play with various combinations of these operators, and you’ll be amazed at how much you’ll be able to fine-tune your searches, alerts, and RSS feeds.

Listen in on Twitter

If you’re trying to eavesdrop on competitors or customers, you’d better be listening on Twitter as well. Fortunately, we can turn Twitter searches into RSS feeds just like we did with blogs and Google searches.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, there are free tools out there that can do this part. HootSuite and TweetDeck come to mind. For our purposes, we’re just trying to pull all of this information into one place. Using Google Reader, I can browse all my competitors’ blog posts, tweets, and Facebook comments every morning with nothing but the scrollwheel on my mouse.

Twitter used to include an RSS feed icon on their search results pages, but removed it over a year ago. Luckily, they only removed the link – the RSS feed URLs still work (for now):

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=YOURKEYWORDS

Simply replace “YOURKEYWORDS” with your target terms and you’ll get a feed of all recent posts containing those keywords. Paste that URL into Google Reader (just like you did with the blog feeds), and you’re done.

Okay, you’re probably not done yet. Twitter is a noisy place. There are a number of things you can do to improve the quality of Twitter search feeds:

• Monitor tweets from or mentions of a specific account:

  http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:hhcolorlab%20OR%20@hhcolorlab (Note – I typed in “from:hhcolorlab OR @hhcolorlab” for this search, and the browser replaces the spaces with “%20.” This is normal.

  

• If you operate a local business, filter tweets by location with latitude and longitude coordinates: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=wedding+photos&geocode=38.966673,-94.6169012,70km

  

  (Use this to find your latitude and longitude coordinates: http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html)

• Search by hashtag to subscribe to popular topics:

  http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23photog

In this example, replace “photog” with your hashtag of choice. Use the following resources to find relevant hashtags:

• • http://hashonomy.com/hashtags/trending/
  • http://hashtags.org/
  • http://twubs.com/
  • Google search for “~Industry hashtags”
• If you’re just looking for opinions and comments (rather than links to blogs), add -rt and -filter:link to your query to remove all retweets and tweets with links. Example:

  http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=wedding photos -rt -filter:link

Note: If you don’t like searching by modifying URLs like the above examples, try Topsy. It’s a simpler search interface, allows you to subscribe by RSS, but you lose some options like searching by location.

Most of the Google Alert tips apply to Twitter searches as well:

• Try to create a good assortment of Twitter feeds with brands, hashtags, and keywords.

   

  

• Create feeds that align with your objectives. You can easily identify tweets that indicate buyer intent, or tweets from related businesses that share your target audience, among other things.

  

• Test a query, look through the results, and keep modifying it until you get it right! A query may seem like a good idea until you try it. For instance, an A/C repair company may try monitoring “hot in here” looking for leads, only to realize that filled their feed with X-rated tweets. (True story)
• Evaluate your feeds regularly. Remove or modify any feed that is adding more noise than value.

Don’t Forget Facebook

Facebook is a little harder to monitor because of privacy settings and a far more limited search function. Even so, you can create an RSS feed from any company Facebook page. Here’s an example:

https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=57676989295

All you need to do is replace 57676989295 with the ID of the Facebook page you’d like to monitor. There are a few ways to find that page ID:

• From the company Facebook page, click their profile image. The Facebook page ID appears in the URL. It will be the set of numbers following the last “.” in a long and messy string:

  

• Alternatively, if you have any friends who like the page, you can right click this link and open it in a new window:

  The URL of the resulting page will include the page_id:

  https://www.facebook.com/browse/friended_fans_of/?page_id=57676989295

Once you have added your page ID to the RSS link provided above, copy and paste that URL into Google Reader to add it to your subscriptions.

While Facebook doesn’t offer a built-in option for monitoring (or even searching for) brand mentions, you can get around that with some clever Google Alerts. Try creating alerts using searches like this:

hhcolorlab site:facebook.com -site:facebook.com/hhcolorlab –rt

In this example, the search will find all mentions of the company’s website address or Twitter handle on any public Facebook timeline except their own. It also removes posts that are Twitter retweets.

Due to privacy settings and a far less robust search interface, our ability to pull data from Facebook is somewhat limited. Whether this adds value depends entirely upon your industry and the companies you’re monitoring.

Video

I could have lumped this in with the Google search/alerts section, but felt it deserved special attention. For a wide variety of reasons (which Rand summarizes), video should probably be part of your content marketing strategy. Why not create another Google Reader folder dedicated exclusively to video?

Using Google Alerts, try a search query where the Result type is set to “Video:”

As with the other feeds, simply add feeds of videos to Google Reader. When you’re testing queries, review the sample results. If your keywords are product-focused, you may get a lot of product review videos from sites like hsn.com. In those cases, you may want to add “-site:hsn.com” or “site:youtube.com” to the query. As always, trial and error is your friend.

Video is the most daunting form of content for most bloggers. With a steady stream of related videos, you may find some ideas you never even considered. The first video in the example above simply showcased a famous photographer’s best work, with some narration. Simple, but fascinating.

Q&A Sites

One more hack using Google Alerts. Plenty of people in the community have talked about Q&A sites and their value for SEO. Why not apply the above concepts to monitor all the top Q&A sites with a single query? Give this a try:

DSLR (site:quora.com OR site:answers.yahoo.com OR site:linkedin.com/answers OR site:wiki.answers.com OR site:askville.amazon.com OR site:fluther.com OR site:answers.com OR site:trueknowledge.com OR site:answerbag.com)

The query above identifies some great questions from Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and other Q&A sites.

Add or subtract from the list of sites as you see fit. Some industries have industry-specific Q&A sites that are worth adding. Sometimes Yahoo! Answers dominates the feed, so I’ll remove it.

Try coming up with a list of questions your customers might be asking. Then break those down to the core phrases you can monitor. Set up a Q&A folder in Google Reader and fill it up with relevant queries. Then, once or twice a day, check your reader for any questions you can answer across a dozen Q&A sites in seconds! Quite a time-saver.

I Have All These Feeds… Now What?

I won’t go into too much detail on what to do next. You’ve just taken the entire web and poured it through a funnel. Pouring out the bottom of that funnel is (I hope) nothing but content relevant to your business or market, teeming with ideas for new blog posts, social campaigns, FAQs, and other valuable resources.

I will share one pro tip from Ian Lurie (Portent Interactive), because it helps distill all the content from Google Reader into easy-to-digest nuggets. Ian delivered this presentation at MozCon 2011. Here’s the gist of it…

Now that you have all these great RSS feeds in Google Reader, make sure they’re all organized into a folder. Click the arrow on the folder and then “Create a Bundle:”

Give the bundle a name and save it. What you have done, essentially, is create an RSS feed of all your RSS feeds.

How does an RSS feed of RSS feeds help, you ask? Portent created a tool to extract recurring terms from the text of an RSS feed: the N-Gramanator. From your newly created bundle, click “Add a link”:

Then grab the Atom feed:

Copy and paste the URL for the Atom feed into the N-Gramanator. This will spit out the most popular 1-, 2- and 3-word phrases in your feed:

Pro tip: when you paste the URL into the tool, add “?n=75” to the end of the URL. That will pull 75 feed entries, rather than the default 20. It gives you more data to work with.

What can you do with this data?

• Spot trending topics
• Visualize blog and twitter activity
• Use Google blog search to look up topics you’re not familiar with so you stay on top of what’s trending.
• Plan blog posts around what’s hot

You’ll get a bit of noise, and may see some odd phrases show up, but hopefully you will also see some interesting topics. If you have dozens of feeds in your bundle, this list could change dramatically every few hours, and may vary in usefulness depending on what people are discussing. If the N-Grams returned are consistently useless, you may want to revisit your list of feeds and fine-tune them a bit.

From the above demo, I pulled the following ideas for future blog posts:

• School senior posing tips
• Wedding close-up tips
• Photography wall displays
• Photography business tips
• Top Canon SLR cameras
• Most popular DSLRs reviewed
• Wedding photography posing tips

Depending on your industry and the feeds you’ve created, you might discover events, popular speakers, new technologies, experts to contact, legal issues or scandals, common questions, new product ideas, or any number of other things. (Ian’s example was considerably better than mine!)

If you’re feeling particularly visual, you can copy the raw text from the N-Gramanator (just below the list of words shown above)…

… and paste it into a tool like Tagxedo to create a word cloud.

We use this primarily to show our clients, visually, what terms are trending. It’s simple and can help us easily make a case for a campaign around a specific topic.

Closing Thoughts

As I mentioned earlier, this process is purely for listening to the web, monitoring brand/keyword mentions, and generating ideas to feed into your content marketing machine. At Optima, we create folders for specific purposes (Q&A, brand mentions, industry blogs) that we check at least once daily. We also compile some more broad folders for periodic brainstorms – these tend to be more open-ended keyword queries.

Managed correctly, Google Reader can open the floodgates on your content strategy. What will you do with all that extra information?

Kyle Claypool is the founder of Optima Worldwide, a Kansas City web marketing firm. He also represented the United States as the US Technical Expert at the WorldSkills Website Design competition in London in October 2011.