Market Research - Tracking buzzes

TRACKING BUZZ ACROSS SOCIAL NETWORKS, FORUMS AND TRENDY WEBSITES

Meta Search Engines are under-the-radar rivals of Google Blog Search and Technorati. Sometimes they have gems the bigger guys don't. A few:

Clusty enables searches for news, images, wikipedia articles and blogs.
Serph tracks buzz in real-time. Search for a product, company name or person. It will include results from blogs, news aggregators, social bookmarking sites (such as Magnolia and del.icio.us), image sharing sites like Flickr, and video sharing sites.
Zuula searches multiple sites at the same time. Run a web query; results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Mahalo and other search sites will be separately tabbed for easy perusal.
Nielsen BrandPulse. This enables you to tap into forums, boards, Usenet newsgroups and blogs that may be discussing your company, brand or product.

Google Trends. What's more popular: The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? Google Trends lets you pit them against each other and graph the results. A broader product, Google Zeitgeist, tracks what users are querying most on the Google search engine.

Facebook Lexicon counts mentions of words and phrases on Facebook users' profiles. Like Google trends, keywords can be pitted against each other (just separate them with a comma). For an example, see Clinton vs. Obama.

TweetScan enables users to search for product or company mentions in real-time across Twitter.com, a website that is popular with early adopters and tech lovers. Also see Twitterverse, which gives you a sense of commonly-tweeted topics of the day; Intwition, which tracks links shared on Twitter; and TweetClouds, which builds tag clouds based on your query. More tools for sifting through Twitter data, or tracking brand buzz on Twitter, are in this article.

BoardTracker lets marketers search for mentions in discussion boards. The homepage also features a dynamic tag cloud, so you can find out what products, brands and topics people are discussing most today.

Google Groups and Yahoo Groups let marketers sift through discussions occurring on, namely, Google or Yahoo Groups.

Much of the information in this MarketingVOX How-To was gleaned from The Art of Strategic Listening by Robert Berkman, who specializes in culling market intelligence from social media resources.