Brands are starting to monitor what is being said about them online on social media and are using both free tools such as TweetDeck and paid Tools like TruPulse and Radian6 to measure the buzz and the comments online.
I personally experienced this monitoring after writing a critical post about General Motors social media engagement versus Ford with its Fiesta Project.
A new real time search tool with the interesting title “48ers” has been released with a very easy to use interface that collects information by the second across the major social media networks.
- Google Buzz
- Digg
- Delicious
I tried it out on “jeffbullas” and what surprised me was the amount of sharing and noise on Google Buzz (which seems like it will be around a bit longer than Google’s Wave)
The original idea was kicked around in 2009 and then developed and launched into Beta in 2010 by the co-founders – 3 brothers from the UK – Chris Whyley, Mike Whyley and Steve Whyley.
Chris and Mike come from a web background having launched a successful online file conversion site, zamzar.com back in 2006, that is still running today attracting over 100,000 visitors each day.
Zamzar was a bootstrapped business originally founded in their spare time – however in 2009 this turned into a full time venture. This allowed extra time for the founders – which has been used to develop 48ers.
Users search for any term they want and 48ers goes away and analyses all the conversations happening across all of the big social networks on the web and presents those conversations back to you in a clean, easy to read format.
This means that you can keep in touch about what people are saying on Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and many other sites all from within one page.
The idea came originally from a need to track what people were saying about Zamzar and they felt that the other realtime search engines did not provide a realtime enough interface as to what everyone was saying – as such 48ers was born. They are now able to track what real people are saying about Zamzar and engage them as necessary.
This tool could be particularly useful for a large number of other web owners (both big and small) and it could be used by bloggers, music bands or individuals who want to track what is being said about them online in realtime.
So what can the 48ers tool provide
- Companies & brands can track what people are saying about them across every major social site from one interface
- Individuals can easily track topics of interest across all the major social networks
- A unique formula displays realtime trending topics from across *all* social sites
- All results are realtime, allowing for “by the second” updates on what is happening
What I liked was that it is easy to use and doesn’t over complicate things and it addresses the major platforms that matter. In fact it reminds me a lot of Google’s very simple interface.
So give it a go and tell me what you think.