My experience on using social media research tools

The social media has been gaining popularity and strength throughout the last few years. And if you come to think of it, it’s a resource full of excellent information- whether you’re a student, a company, an employee, a brand manager or just some customer trying to find some information- the diverse social media sites will help you find what you’re looking for.

For social media research tools- to name a few- there is: google blog search, google zeitgeist, icerocket, social mention, and google custom search. All of these tools (each with its specific function) allow individuals to find out what other people are saying about a specific brand, person or company or even when people are talking about you. The good news for these tools, is that not only do you see the information but it also allows you to respond to it. Also, if you are a company the social web is a great place to learn about what your competitors are putting out there, and what others are saying about them.

 To share my experience in using social media research tools, I actually took an opportunity to use Google Blog Search. I was interested at the moment on knowing what other people out there were saying about Starbucks coffee- since I had one in the afternoon- so I entered the keyword into the search bar. It then came with a huge list of recent blog posts that had something to do with Starbucks. I then saw was that on the left side of the webpage, the Google Blog search allows you display the blog results depending on the time they were published- so you can choose if you want to see blogs just published within the last hour, the last 12 hours, ‘till the past month. In my case, I chose blogs within the last day. I then started seeing the titles- and obviously chose the one title that caught my attention, just for the fun of it. But no matter what blog you choose to read, it brings you to get ongoing insight about the brand, company or person you were interested in searching for.
I clicked on “YA Fresh: Starbucks Holidays, Fa la la la la, la la la la” blog. The author of the blog talked about the new drinks Starbucks was bringing this Christmas season- I actually didn’t know which coffees Starbucks would introduce this November!  What
I found surprising- and I think it happens in a lot of blogs- was that even though this blog was posted earlier this afternoon it already had 3 comments from other people. People actually responded by saying they were excited on trying these new coffee flavors, because they had loved the previous coffee flavors from other past holidays. So this brings me to realize that on blogs with a good following, the comments are often as valuable as the blog post itself. People have things to say and are interested on sharing their experiences, knowledge and opinions- that’s why blogs are so rich on information, ‘cause they provide good insight about a certain topic.

To stay up to date on the blog results, Google Blog search also offers you the option to:
-    Create an email alert for starbucks
-    Search Google news for starbucks
-    Add a blog search gadget for starbucks to your Google homepage
-    Subscribe to a blog search for starbucks in Google reader