This past weekend, YackTrack was undergoing some fairly routine database maintenance. This maintenance was not officially announced as it was not supposed to truly affect any site performance. There was a note posted on Twitter in case there was a slight slowdown, but none was really expected. That is, nothing bad was expected until the maintenance was started. Most of the maintenance went smoothly, as is expected for a majority of the work. However, there is always something that changes plans.

One part of the maintenance was running ridiculously slow. At first, I thought it was just taking a bit of time to complete the maintenance, but I noticed that the site was being affected. As I assessed the situation, performance on the site was getting worse. About the same time as I decided to take YackTrack down during the maintenance, the site became unresponsive (how convenient). Once the site was down, I was able to figure out the reason for the slow running maintenance.

What was the real problem? I was trying to cut corners, as most people do for simple things like routine database maintenance. I was trying to implement some performance enhancements, and I figured that some other maintenance could wait until next weekend. If I had thought things through, and did not try to quickly implement my changes, I would have seen that the performance improvements really required some other maintenance. Specifically, I would have seen that the maintenance I postponed until next weekend was really required for my performance improvements. So, I corrected the situation by completing the basic maintenance that I hoped to postpone and then implemented the performance improvements, which ran much quicker this time.

The moral of the story is, there is no such thing as a quick fix and do not try to cut corners when you know better. The database maintenance that I was trying to postpone only required 15 minutes to complete. The performance improvements then required another 30 minutes. However, I wasted almost 5 hours trying to cut corners, and I had to take the site down for a few hours as well.

Again, I apologize for the downtime, the lack of communication prior to the maintenance and for any inconvenience this may have caused. In the future, I will be writing a short blog post to notify everyone of any maintenance, and trying to ensure I do not cut any corners.

Things have been quiet on this blog for several months. The reason for that is due to some of the earliest programming decisions that were made. So, the past few months were spent preparing for the future. Many of the decisions that were made in the beginning were based on the idea that YackTrack was only a blog comment tracking application. Due to such silly assumptions, adding on keyword searches and more services meant that the application became more complicated than it needed to be.

So, a better foundation has been laid down. There is still work to do, but there is a much better plan in place. Some things which looked like they would be almost impossible to add, are now possible.

However, when decisions are made, sometimes they do not go in favor of the user. The big change today is that only 13 months of history will be kept for free accounts. This change in data will occur over several days or weeks, depending on how much it affects the live service. Up to this point, I was trying to keep as much history as possible. This is just not cost effective for a free service. You may be asking why I said “free accounts”  or whether there are non-free accounts. Currently, there are no premium accounts, but it they have always been in the plan. There will be premium services in the near future, and longer history could be an option but I am not promising anything yet.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback or feature requests, please let me know.

Maybe you have read the previous post on this blog, or you realize that monitoring social media is becoming very important. If you read that last post, you will see there are some free and simple “do-it-yourself” tools that you can use to get started monitoring social media. The problem is that monitoring social media is not simple, and sometimes there are features that you would like, but they are not available in services like Google Alerts. Not included in that post is a big list of monitoring tools. If you look at that list, you will realize there are a ton of options when trying to monitor social media. How do you know what tool to start using? Even that list does not give a good picture as it is highly dependent upon what you want to do and what you really need. So, what do you need to know or ask when looking for social media monitoring tools?

10 Questions To Ask When You Want To Monitor Social Media

1. What kind of sites do you want to monitor? Are blogs more important or are the comments from Facebook what you are trying to listen to? Many tools are better at certain things, like blogs, forums, or Twitter.
2. What are you trying to monitor? Are you monitoring your brand or are you monitoring a keyword or phrase like “social media monitor”? Some tools will have special features if you are targeting a brand. Other tools are more focused on keyword monitoring.
3. How much money do you want to spend? There are some solid free tools as well as some extensive and expensive tools. How much you want to spend is probably related to the type of features you want as well. Sometimes, the free or cheap tools can help you get started and figure out what you really want to do.
4. What do you expect to get out of monitoring? As many social media people will tell you, you need to know what you are expecting. You can not start monitoring for your brand and expect additional sales to roll in. If you monitor, you need to have a plan of action. In some cases, you may just want to become more engaged with your customers. In other cases, you may be pushing discounts or promotions through social media that you want to track the success of.
5. Do you want basic social media analytics? Social media is quite a wide breadth of sites. There are basic metrics like how many times a specific keyword was mentioned, or maybe how many times a blog post was shared. These metrics can also be segmented by the type of site, i.e. social news or social network, as well as the sites themselves.
6. Do you want to hook into your web analytics? Tracking metrics for social media is only one piece of the puzzle. Even if you tweeted about a discount in your store, and it was retweeted several times, how can you tell that it had any effect? You can make a correlation to your basic web analytics metrics. You could include a campaign code in the URL that you post for a direct correlation to traffic, or you can make a loose correlation by looking at referral sources.
7. Do you want basic or advanced analysis features? Do you want some standard reports or the ability to slice and dice the data in any manner that you see fit? Some of the more advanced tools give you the ability to analyze data in something similar to a Microsoft Excel pivot table. You may also be able to export data to Excel or some other format.
8. Are you doing this work as an agency for other companies or do you have multiple people looking at the data? Some tools expect you to be an individual monitoring something. Other tools are built by marketing agencies for marketing agencies, where you can have a “workspace” for each client. There are options in between as well, where you can monitor up to a specific number of keywords or just allow multiple people access one account. Some tools also have white label or branded services, where you can go to the site and you see your own company’s logo and other branding elements. Typically, the branded services are separate costs in addition to the monitoring fees.
9. Do you want to be able to see mentions and reply to them in one application? Most social media monitoring tools are purely “listen only”. This makes sense given that they are monitoring tools. However, you may be ready to respond quickly to mentions on Twitter or Facebook. To do this, you typically need to use a different application to write your tweets. Some tools are now including some basic writing capabilities.
10. Do you want to create social media campaigns and then look and listen to the results in one application? There is another group of tools that probably fall into the marketing category that allow you to create social media campaigns, send data to the various social media sites and monitor these sites all in one. These tools are much more advanced than simple monitoring, and you can expect to pay more for them. However, some larger brands would really be able to take advantage of such capabilities.

So, if you are new to social media monitoring, or you are using a smaller tool and want to take advantage of some of the advanced features of other tools, there are always questions to ask. Hopefully, this list will get you started and you will think of other questions you want to ask. One important note is that most of the social media monitoring companies are very responsive to inquiries and demo requests. If you review the list of monitoring tools, they all have their website listed so you can quickly visit the site and find the appropriate contact information. As with any information in a rapidly moving industry, the data is quickly outdated or incorrect. So if someone recommends a tool to you and the information on that list does not seem to match the recommendation, take a look at the tool anyway. Recommendations are always worth more than a basic list of tools.

You have heard all of the hype regarding social media, but you have no idea why your company should use it. There are plenty of blogs that you can read about the conversation and marketing aspects of social media, so I will not go into those topics here. You have also probably heard people in your company that are scared to let people onto social media sites even if it is to respond to a negative comment about your company. The reasons for this typically stem from fear, i.e. “What if people say something bad about our company?” Along with many other people, I am here to tell you that worrying about whether people are saying negative things is wrong. People are already saying negative things, and maybe positive as well, but you do not know about it.

So, how do you find out what people are saying? You monitor social media. In this post, I am going to go through some basic free tools that can help you get started with monitoring. Over the next few posts I will be talking about various tools that you can use for monitoring different sites. First, let’s look at the free tools that give you a basic level of monitoring:

Google Alerts gives you the ability to save a search over the web, news, blogs and groups and receive an email with the results. This type of alert is a nice way to start as it gives you some nice information in an email. Google’s recent introduction of real-time search data will make Alerts a more interesting option as well.

Twitter Saved Searches give you the results from a basic Twitter search. The saved search can be viewed as an RSS feed in you favorite RSS reader, or converted into an email using an RSS-to-email conversion service. Twitter searches are helpful if your typical customers or users are on Twitter, but it obviously suffers from being specific to one service.

Facebook Lexicon is the search platform for facebook. The good part is that Facebook has over 350 million users now. The bad part is that you are still stuck with searching one service.

BoardTracker lets you search bulletin boards and forums. Many services do not search forums, so this is a very handy tool to know about.

Yahoo Pipes is more of a development tool for non-developers, but it is still somewhat complicated. If you have someone with technical savvy, they can probably build an interesting tool. At the minimum, they can pipe together an RSS feed from a Google Blog Search and an RSS feed from a Twitter search. You can also look around for some prebuilt social media pipes to help you get started.

This should get you started with monitoring social media. Even though these tools are free and typically very good, they only give you an elementary start to your social media monitoring. For a long list of various tools you can use for monitoring social media, take a look at http://wiki.kenburbary.com/. I will be talking about several of those tools later. Of course, I would prefer that you give YackTrack a try.

If you are reading this, you have found the new YackTrack blog! As announced in this post on RegularGeek, this blog now contains all of the previous YackTrack posts so you can follow the story from the beginning. In addition to previous posts and the obvious YackTrack news, there will be posts on topics relevant to YackTrack like social media monitoring, distributed conversations, and brand and reputation management. Keep on eye on the pages here as well. Much of the static content for YackTrack, like help and tools pages, will make its way to the blog.

Just launching a blog is not enough though. YackTrack itself has been updated as well! First, you will notice that the user interface has changed again. Yes, I know it was redesigned only a few months ago, but the redesign did not properly represent what the service does. So, you will notice less darkness as well as sexier dialogs Thanks to YUI, I was able to upgrade the dialogs, clear up a few defects and provide better cross browser support. As with all significant UI changes, there will be bugs, so if you find them just let us know. You will also notice that the “chatter” tab and “home” tab have been replaced with one Search item. One of the big complaints I received was confusion regarding the two different searches, so simplification was needed.

Lastly, YackTrack now supports Google Sidewiki, Flickr and YouTube. Flickr and YouTube can be monitored for keywords, but generally do not make sense for URL searches. Google Sidewiki launched to much controversy, but it does provide a decent way to retrieve comments for a URL. Support for Sidewiki will likely change in the longer term as Google builds out more API support.

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