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April 03, 2008
Keeping up with the social media fire hose
A few days ago I marveled how Salesforce.com rapidly responded to my tweet on Twitter about one of the company's products.
I asked Kingsley Joseph of Salesforce how he saw my tweet so quickly. He sent me a link to his Yahoo Pipes setup that tracks Salesforce's online word of mouth.
Yahoo Pipes allows you to build a single feed that is made up of other
feeds and data). Kingsley's pipe tracks online mentions of Salesforce and other
company products across social media sites like Flickr, Technorati,
Bloglines, Digg, Techmeme, YouTube, Friendfeed and Quotably Tweetscan (for
Twitter.)
Kingsley is kind; he coded a generic pipe for CotC readers to track mentions about your company. Here's the pipe.
According to Kingsley, here's how to use the pipe:
In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: "salesforce+ideas", ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important.
The first time you run the search, Yahoo might return an empty list. To force it to go fetch feeds, click "More Options" and then click "Get as RSS". You can then hit back and re-run the pipe successfully.
Titles are de-duplicated and sorting is reverse chronological. Multiple search terms can be used and the matched term will be prefixed to the title of the post. This doesn't do mass media, because there are good tools for that (Google Alerts come to mind). Send any feature requests Kingley's way, but don't hold your breath. He's a busy guy : )
Other blogs that reference Keeping up with the social media fire hose:
This is cool. Thanks for sharing.
Wow this is some great stuff! It's like Google Alerts -- only Social Media Alerts.. love it!
This is excellent. Many thanks to Kingsley for sharing the goodies! Getting pipe related to my website took barely ten seconds to set up. Great post!
I've been looking for a good way to wrangle this sort of stuff! Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words folks. If this is something enough people find useful, maybe I'll make a web app out of it .
BTW, I've switched from using Tweetscan to Quotably. I like being alerted to the entire conversation instead of just an individual tweet.
And recursively, I can now keep track of mentions of "Social Media Firehose" using itself :)
Had it running for a few hours now and wow! Thanks again! How did I get by without this?!
this is a great tool and a great example of how to "listen" thanks!
Excellent tool! Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
-Jon
Wow!!!!! I can't believe how good this thing is.
I'm going to use it to monitor all of my clients now. Thanks for posting.
ah found this via twitter. this confirms my thoughts for a future project. thanks for posting.
Holy crap, great find!
Very good content, a useful read.
I love it that Kingsley uses the firehose to track itself, then promptly joins conversations wherever it's mentioned.
He did this on my blog too. I listed 4 methods and 40 tools to listen to online conversations - but the firehose trumps them all.
