At Creative Traction, much like any PR firm, we have half a dozen or more tools we use for any one process. No one tool is absolute and we find using them in combination is proving to be a better metric to grade against.

Monitor

What does the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Google and Blizzard Entertainment all have in common? They monitor the people within their community. CSIS makes sure Canadians are kept safe from all forms of threat. Google and Blizzard make sure that the users (aka community) of their software are playing by the rules and having fun. All three also listen and solicit feedback from their respective users and use that to improve on what they offer.

You need to treat your public relations plan in the same way. Whether it’s internally or externally, you need to know what everyone is thinking and saying about you at each stage of the execution of the plan. Some of the tools we use include the following:

Technorati

Technorati is the Google of search engines for blogs. Technorati does more then just search blogs. It also ranks the top blogs globally, which allows you to see what the community is talking about and what is hot or not from news to movies to video games. However, we are going to stick to the search engine aspect of Technorati.

Here is the search result for Guitar Hero 2 on the 360. With your results you can refine them and only show blogs in one of 20 languages or those with high authority like Joystiq or Kotaku. You can also grab the RSS feed for your search and be kept up to date on the latest for your video game or that of your competitor. A Technorati search is one of the first things we do for any client. It’s a good way to gauge what is being said about them online, in a broad overview kind of way.

PODZINGER

PODZINGER is the Technorati of the podcasting and video world. You can search for your name, a brand you love, or even a new client. They just added a feature for searching YouTube, which is a good sign of things to come. To give you an idea of how the site works, let's search for Army of Two, as I’m completely looking forward to the game.

Here are my results for PODZINGER and for the YouTube feature. Just for fun, here is the search result for World of Warcraft. A nice thing about the results is it shows a snippet of the conversation around the word and where it is in the show. You can click on any of the words to start the stream at that precise point in time. We also get a date, screen cap and link to the show. So whether you are searching video or podcasts, PODZINGER should help you find what’s out there about your video game.

Inclue

Inclue is a free tool that lets you read RSS feeds in your Outlook. So instead of using NetNewsWire, Google Read or Bloglines, you can use Inclue and have one less program to deal with. What sets Inclue apart from the other rss feed readers is that it just doesn’t deal with blogs. You can also add a podcast, video and music to your RSS feed reader and play the podcast or video right there in Outlook as well.

Inclue is a great way to stay on top of what is being said about you after you’ve used Technorati, PODZINGER and other tools to survey the land. I think Inclue is a great tool and one that isn’t better then the other rss feed readers above. It’s just different and brings certain traits to the table. Maybe you want to sync your Blackberry to your feed, which you can only do with Bloglines. So it’s more of a question of which one fits into your digital lifestyle better.

All of the above tools and the other half dozen or so that we use at Creative Traction help us monitor what is being said about our clients, as well as their brands and products. However, unless you can put all that information into context, respond, and then lead your team toward your goals, it’ll all be useless, which brings us to our next point.