Finally, a mainstream tracking system is being developed to enable alerts on mentions of a website or brand name across social networking sites including Flickr, Digg, Technorati - and all of those other brilliantly viral, but frustratingly untrackable breeding-houses of online word-of-mouth.
OK, that was a long sentence. I haven't thoroughly explored Yahoo! Pipes yet to be an expert on what it really is, besides what Yahoo says it is, which is a "free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor." ... But whatever it is, and however it works, it has allowed the invention of Kingsley Joseph's Social Media Firehose.
The Social Media Firehouse pipe allows you to receive alerts whenever your brand or site is mentioned on select social media sites. It is based on Joseph's Social Media Mention Engine pipe, which simply returns a list of mentions across specialized searches like Yahoo! Local, Google Base, and Flickr.
The following is an excerpt from Church of the Customer, and details how to actually USE the pipe. Enjoy.
'In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: "salesforce+ideas", ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important.
The first time you run the search, Yahoo might return an empty list. To force it to go fetch feeds, click "More Options" and then click "Get as RSS". You can then hit back and re-run the pipe successfully.
Titles are de-duplicated and sorting is reverse chronological. Multiple search terms can be used and the matched term will be prefixed to the title of the post. This doesn't do mass media, because there are good tools for that (Google Alerts come to mind). Send any feature requests Kingley's way, but don't hold your breath. He's a busy guy : )'
As a side note, the reason I can copy and paste the above text is because CotC has a Creative Commons attribution. Very cool.
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