I get asked about buzz research - how you can capture what people are saying about a particular brand or product online - a fair bit, so I thought I would do the decent thing and write something down. There are plenty of paid for services which can help you monitor web chatter, Radian 6 and Nielsen's buzz metrics are two examples. But in the "current economic climate" who can afford to pay for anything? With this in mind I'm going to focus on tools and techniques you can use for nothing. This first post will start with a really really simple example and subsequent posts will get gradually more complicated but (hopefully) more useful.

DIY Buzz Research 101

For me this buzz research lark is all about trying to gather semi-structured data from a number of different places, collate it and display/analyse it in some meaningful way. The absolute easiest way to start gathering this data is to find a (free) service which will do it for you. Socialmention is one such service. All you do is select the sources you want to search, type in the thing you want information on and click 'search'. So, if for some reason I can't imagine at the moment I wanted to see what people were saying about the X-Factor I would search and get a page like this http://socialmention.com/search.... This page displays the latest posts from a number of sources, does some automated sentiment analysis, top keywords, you can export the data as a CSV file, set up on email alert, all good stuff. So Socialmention is a really simple/free way to start measuring web chatter. In the next post we'll look at doing something a bit more complicated but hopefully more useful.