philgo

October 20, 2009

How were you doing it before the Web revolution ? What did you dropped along the way ?

I am back from a 2 weeks trip with no cell phone, no laptop and no PDA and I survived. Pretty well in fact.

It made me wonder how was I handling everything before this “online world”. And realized that we sometimes forgot details of the process we modified along the way.

Nowadays, you are probably using a web application/ service or technological piece of hardware for most of your important process, whether it’s related to communications and booking, marketing, accounting, leisure, sales or product and project management. Before you decided to drop the old fashioned way of doing things, you probably balanced the pros and cons during long hours. After all, the old fashioned way had got you that far, was probably not totally broken and you had grow comfortable using it.

On top of that, maybe there was some information or nice feature you had to drop because the new way was not offering them yet.

It took you some time to get used to the new thing but you most probably gave hope of going back after a short while and soon you had totally forgotten about the “old way”. And it’s ok.

But maybe it’s time to check what we dropped along the way and start using it again or improving the new way. With UrbanSpoon, Praized, Yelp and others, who still goes up to the hotel concierge to get a restaurant recommendation ? It might know and have an extra pair of tickets for the theater tonight. Who knows

Go back to what you dropped and see how you can improve the new way.

September 15, 2009

Are we expecting too much from Social Media Monitoring tools ?

I’d be hard pressed to guess if social media monitoring tools have finally crossed the chasm but they’ve clearly been riding a solid buzz for the last 18 months. Looking at the client list of Radian6, Sysomos or ScoutLabs you soon realize that many major brands have jumped on the bandwagon to be able to monitor the buzz and sentiment that their brand, products and competitors generate.

Some voices are questioning the real value and possible ROI of these platforms, sometimes in opposition with free solutions. And it totally make sense when monthly fees easily range in the 500-1000$/month for the main solutions with a decent set-up.

One of these, entititled “The problems with Social Media Monitoring technologies“, seems to have decent web findability as it was sent to me a couple times by friends and clients in the past weeks. I’ll take a moment to go over these particular points one by one.

1. The technology is fairly stupid. It either don’t do what it says on the tin or do it quite badly. It is supposed to be simple: based on keyword configuration, the software scrolls the social web and collect mentions of your keyword(s). It then supposes to analyse themes and influence ranking and sentiment etc, which it does with limited accuracy . For example, will pick up any header, ad sense or footer mentions of your keywords even if it’s in the totally irrelevant context. If your brand name is pretty generic you are in deep sh*t. Hours of configuration and exclusions awaiting you.

You have the same problem when you search with Google. Building up good search queries takes time, analysis, trial & error and a good understanding of the brand, product and industry . Nobody said social media monitoring would be easy or obvious. The web is getting noisier everyday and good queries are more valuable than ever.

Unreliable data. The most important thing to understand is that the software simply provides you with piles of data. Before you can extract anything meaningful from this data you have to go through hours and hours of spam filtering which can be very tedious if you are dealing with 1000s of mentions every week/month. In some occasions I had over 50% irrelevant data coming through my dashboard. Additionally, the spiders cannot access all social spaces and sometimes the most important conversations are blocked.

There’s a clear need to be able to classified results by social engagement, source, language, sentiment and geo-demographics. There’s spam in Google results as well obviously and you need good tools and techniques to cut through the noise.

Sentiment analysis is flawed. Again, this is part of the limitation of the technology. The software analyses keywords, not human emotions and, on average, the software gets it wrong 30% of the data because human emotions are subtle and complex and not easily categorised by software – we are not there yet.

I agree. And one of the reason is that we are usually measuring the message instead of the effect. Sentiment analysis should be mainly used as an extra filter. 60-70% reliability is better than nothing and probablu much higher for tweets.

Good monitoring tools allows for user to overwrite the results of sentiment analysis. Results needs to be reviewed, but it’s still much faster than evaluating everything manually.

Region specific data: for global brands, social media have very strong global element as well as clear regional bent (forums, blogs, networks etc). This is tricky especially if you are working with a regional client (e.g Huggies UK). Problem is for the software it’s not about where you are but which domain are you using. So reliable geo / regional analysis is, in many cases imposible to carry or not complete so need to be complemented with manual search.

True, Twitter localization is only based on what the user enters as location in but will soon be changed by the new API opt-in feature.
The ability to drill down the query with localization-related keyword helps obviously.

Influence analysis is flawed. Well, the concept of influenced is flawed so of course technologies of measuring it are flawed as well. Similar to sentiment, the technology is just not as clever as they want you to believe. It is based either on bogus metrics or just irrelevant, obsolete ranks .

Agrred, most implementation are. That’s why I always ask before evaluating or using. Sysomos has their own Postrank-style ranking. Social Mention (free) as added PostRank to their results.

If I were to design a full platform, I’d be using Postrank to rank results.

Time consuming. Because all of the above, the reality is that while thess companies provide you with piles of data and funky visualisations the profound unreliability of the software means you have to sit for hours and days and configure the dashboard, refine the data, correct the scores, filter the spam, get rid of irrelevant data AND THEN, AND ONLY THEN you can start making some meaningful analysis.

It does take quite a lot of time to set-up and it’s not easy. After a lengthy initial process, the work involved somewhat decrease but you will still have to filter out some spam.

The analysis will always take time. That’s why many brands work with analysts to help them make sense of it.

Price. This varies significantly but the fact is that you pay just for the data and license fees to use the software. For the level of service you don’t get value for your money.

I’d expect to have access to an API to integrate with client workflow and platforms or to customize views and results, the ability to query on past period and modify queries at any time.

Conclusion

Social Media Monitoring platforms are not be-all end-all solutions, more of a building block of brand’s modern tool set for effective market research, marketing and customer support. They require investment both in time and money and more often than not, some support from people who have done it before and are comfortable using these particular tools.

How to Create a Share of Voice Report (socialmediatoday.com)
Do Social Media Marketers Dream Of Monitoring Tools? (threeminds.organic.com)
Collecta releases API to spur development of real-time search apps (venturebeat.com)
Twitter Works to Improve Location ID Service (marketingpilgrim.com)
Google Gives Sentiment Analysis a Multistar Rating (mikemoran.com)

August 28, 2009

Top 3 Twitter Ranking Tools Test And Review

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ranking social media users can be seen as an ego trip, but with communication and information channels growing and evolving so fast, it simply make sense to use a somewhat automated way to filter out users based on their influence. While PostRank gives me a nice way to evaluate social engagement around content, many apps are starting to express the need to use a similar filter to evaluate Twitter users by interest and activity.

Getting a score for a user is not so useful in itself, but is (we’ll be) a building block and filter-classifier of many upcoming tools and services.

I haven’t yet found a tool that fully satisify my needs but here’s the best of what I’ve tried so far.

The Tested Ranking Tools

The References

To perform a real test, I needed some kind of references, so I used the following profiles:

The Normal Guy

@PhilGo20 : My own profile. I consider myself a fairly active Twitter user, with an ok following (around 560) and a close to 1:1 follower/following ratio. I retweet, been retweeted a couple times and am mentionned a couple times a week in reply.

The VIP

@SebProvencher : Seb is a Praized.com co-founder (Mtl startup) and Product Development Manager. I like his tweets and read all of them (thxs for TweetDeck group feature). He has close to 1500 followers, but he’s only following 480 persons, giving him what is seen as an excellent follower/following ratio.

The Popular

@Caterina : Caterina is Cofounder of Flickr and Hunch and a social media startup star. She has over 9000 followers but just over 200 tweets.

The Not-So Active

@PhilipBoum : Philippe is one of the NOFOLO/Percute Technologies guy in Quebec City, involved in the business side of these web services small companies. I don’t know if he’s using an automated follow back script but he has over 1000 followers with only 14 tweets and have not tweetted once in the last month. I am guessing he has a life outside Twitter, and that’s good !

The Spammer

@entrepreneur949: Sorry if you read this and you are not, but by your tweets and your link, if I were to design a spam tool for Twitter, you would be targeted.

The Inactive (used as a reference for the test)

@philippegauvin : I am squatting my own name domain. Only 2 tweets redirecting to my real account. 0 followers / 0 following.

Each reference is pretty self-explanatory, except the difference between Caterina and SebProvencher. I wanted to have both because I think they have different type of influence. To me most of SebProvencher influence comes from his activity on Twitter while Caterina’s comes from who she is. Without being very active, she has an important following. Praized is not know on the street while Flickr is (pick your street).

The Results (on August 27th 2009)

Retweetrank (0-100 percentile)

PhilGo20 : 91.4
SebProvencher : 98.59
Caterina : 98.6
PhilipBoum : 0:0
PhilippeGauvin : 0.0
Entrepreneur949 : 0.0

Twitter Grader (0-100 I suspect it’s a percentile)

PhilGo20 : 95.7
SebProvencher : 99.7
Caterina : 99.4
PhilipBoum : 96
PhilippeGauvin : 25
Entrepreneur949 : 89

Twitterank (not normalized, 0-200+)

PhilGo20 : 16.93
SebProvencher : 94.97
Caterina : 32.17
PhilipBoum : 0
PhilippeGauvin : 0
Entrepreneur949 : 0

First, despite the usefulness of TwitterGrader and some well thought features (I like the tag cloud), it is no yet usable in my sense as it rank inactive and spam account way to high.

Retweetrank does a pretty good job, but it’s very harsh if you haven’t tweetted in the last month. I would think PhilipBoum deserves better than 0. Having read the way they rank users, it seems to be only looking at the last month of activity. There is pros and cons to that approach in my mind. It does a very good job at filtering out Spam account though. What I am wondering is this : Could only one spam supporter account retweeting the main account be sufficient to put Retweetrank at wrong ? Have not tested it yet. Also, it does not really separate significantly me, Caterina, and SebProvencher. That’s why you cannot be using a percentile as an actual rank.

TwitterRank does a good job too, but also harsh on PhilipBoum account. Maybe that’s the way it should be, but maybe the guy took a month off Twitter ! On the other hand, this is the only tool, that seems to normalize the value (not using the percentile as a rank) and the only one that shows the difference between Caterina and SebProvencher’s influence.

Conclusion

I think TwitterRank is doing the best job by far here and their simple API is also a big plus. There’s is going to be a large number of ranking tool for social media users coming up in the next months, so it’s futile to bet on the future of this service but the need for it is obvious to me. Mash it !

August 25, 2009

Quelques liens et découvertes – 20 juillet – 20 août 2009

Parce que parfois nos tweets passent tout droit, mais qu’ils valent la peine d’être lus

Ma première utilisation de FixMystreet.ca, une excellente initiative de VisibleGovernment.ca

VisibleGovernment, qui se dévoue à rendre à rendre les l’accès aux informations gouvernemental plus simples et plus transparents, a récemment lancé FixMyStreet.ca, une application web permettant de soumettre un problème dans notre voisinage (rue endommagé, graffiti, etc.)

RescueTime

Suite à la lecture d’un billet de Martin Heewig, fondateur de WordPress, où il explique en autres choses sa façon d’organiser son agenda et jongler avec les meetings, le développement et la business, j’ai commencé à utiliser RescueTime. Je ne peux pas dire que cela à pour l’instant augmenter ma productivité, mais après 4 semaines à observer les résultats, je viens d’y entrer des objectifs (less than 1 hour on X website/application), on verra bien s’ils seront atteints et si le travail accélérera.

Démo vidéo de Lithium, un Social CRM

Les CRM devient sociaux. C’est probablement le produit CRM le plus intéressant que j’ai vu depuis que j’entends l’expression social CRM. Excellent démo qui promet, permettant de mettre à profit les médias sociaux pour le support, la promotion et l’innovation entourant un produit/marque.

Great WhitePaper by @sysomos On Identifying, Engaging and Monitoring Social Network Users for Wow Marketing

Sysomos, qui lançait récemment sa plateforme de Social Media Monitoring, a publié un excellent papier sur l’identification, l’engagement et la veille des usagers sur les médias sociaux.

Outils gratuits de veille des médiax sociaux

Il y a de plus en plus d’utilisateurs mécontents des plateformes de ORM (analyse de réputation en ligne) actuelles, des paterformes pour le moins coûteuses.
Il existe plusieurs façon de s’en sortir gratuitement et cet article présente une bonne analyse de 4 outils gratuits. À lire si vous êtes à la recherche d’une solution ‘correcte’ et surtout gratuite.

August 21, 2009

What United Airlines should have done about “United Breaks Guitars”

I am taking for granted that you know about the Broken Guitars video and for those who doesn’t, read here and watch here.

I was reading yesterday about “United Breaks Guitar Part 2” and I got interested in United Airlines reaction to the whole chain of event.

My first reaction when I heard about the video lat month was that they should have (assuming it wasn’t fixed before the videos) offered him 2 open tickets to any destination valid for 1 year. And a replacement guitar. Why ? Well simply because an open ticket is the kind of stuff that most of the population dream about and public opinion would have gone : “Wow, that’s cool ! They did a mistake but they’ve fixed it properly !”Just a replacement wouldn’t cut it at this point obviously.

Chances are he might have had accepted while some critics would have scream he’s a social media sellout. In the end the story would have died down but would be refered as “Customer Complaint Through Social Media 101″ course. The video would have lived forever and be the standout element of the story.

Well, United Airlines offered a replacement guitar to Dave Carroll which understandably he did not want and gave to charity. Too little, too late … With all the fame he got from his first video, it would take much more than a replacement guitar to close the story. To make matter worse, United added that …

“‘While we mutually agree this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave’s excellent video provides us with something we can use for training purposes to ensure that all customers receive better service for us,’ spokeswoman Robin Urbanski told the (Chicago Sun Times).”

Really ?

So today when I read about the video sequel, I thought that there might have been a better way for United Airlines to do damage control (in fact there’s many…).

My idea ? Fight fire with Fire. Answer with another viral video. United should have hired a hip young music video producer to shoot a cool and funny ‘We are sorry, we make a mistake and will try to avoid suck miss-up in the future’ excuse video with a little tongue-in-cheek humour for good measure. A couple United Execs and VPs singing bad choirs or trying the guitar would have done the trick.

Such a video, if well done and there is a high number of people who could have done something amazing, could have become nearly as popular as the original one. Great PR coup. And most of all, this would have greatly close the gap between the customer (Dave Carroll) and the brand (United Airlines).

Customer way of expressing complaints is evolving, so should Brand answers and tactics to keep customer happy. Obviously, it should be fixed way before, but in reality, we all know many more episodes of that kind will happen in the next months and I will be curious to see which brand will be the first to take it to the next level.

Now producing a video to cover up the Domino Incident would have had been way more challenging They probably took the right decision by going “corpo” with their excuses…

August 14, 2009

Entrepreneurs don’t golf, they ride bikes !

This is mostly the reposting of a comment I left on the Tungle ( a nice calendar accelerator startup based in Montreal) blog on a post titled : Entrepreneurs Don’t Golf.

I am supporting his claim and explaining why cycling his a good alternative for entrepreneurs.

I couldn’t agree more and my vote goes to cycling

1. Cycling is fast. 35-40kph is standard pace, going over 40 when riding in line is easy, sprints starts at 52kph and in a good descent you can reach 80-90kph, if you can hold the bike !

2. Team is super important on a bike. Just try to ride by yourself with headwind and you’ll quickly understand the value of your team or partners. It’s all about a good lane and perfect execution.

3. Cycling is uber-competitive. Just goes on Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve pretty much every evening of the week or on Camilien Houde on any given afternoon. Nobody want to get passed by another rider. Especially by a girl

4. When both partners know each other style, tactics and strength, they quickly become more than the sum of their part.

5. Creativity. From riding style, sprint tactics and overall strategies, creativity is everywhere.
I would ad, that cycling will get you in MUCH better physical shape than golf, allows for ongoing conversation while riding, only interrupted by attacks if needed and will probably learn you more about a partner, client, investor, supplier or advisor personnality than golf would.

Any other cycling fan in the mtl tech community ?

After that comment, I started thinking about organizing yet another meet-up for mtl tech entrepreneurs cyclists. Something informal, just to meet new riding and business partners.

In the meantime, I went riding around Sutton and Jay Peak last weekend and met a nice guy who told me about ACDA : Association cycliste en développement des affaires, who organize monthly cycling/networking rides. Registration is full for this year, but I’ll surely check them out next year.

Any cycling tech fan in Montreal looking for new riding partners ? In for a new cycling group ? Let’s go rideand talk about circular dependency !

July 23, 2009

Comment suivre 450+ personnes sur Twitter sans se fatiguer

Stéphane Guérin, que je connais heureusement hors Twitter, a publié un billet très commenté ce matin sur le “snobisme à la Twitter” où il explique avoir été confronté à l’expression et où il expose sa philosophie face à la question “suivre ou pas suivre”.

Je respecte sa façon de voir (même si je suis super déçu qu’il ne me suive toujours pas, ça doit être les tweets sur le bécik…) et moi-même je ne suis pas non plus tout ceux qui me suivent. Par contre, je remarque que beaucoup de commentateurs et Steph lui-même semble avoir un problème commun : comment suivre un nombre grandissant de personnes sans manquer les tweets importants et passer sa journée là dessus. Ma réponse à une question que je me suis posé : utiliser les groupes dans TweetDeck.

C’est du connu pour un paquet de monde, mais pour les autres, voici comment je m’en sers. Le problème est qu’on ne donne

twitter_tip

pas la même importance à tous ceux qu’on suit: il y a certains dont on ne veut rien manquer ou presque et d’autre qu’on voudrait lire une fois de temps en temps en diagonale.

Je me suis créé 6 groupes, selon mes intérêts bien sûr :

VIP
web monitoring & reputation management
digital signage
montreal techno
quebec techno
online marketing

Je ne manque rien des 3 premiers et pas grand chose des 3 derniers. Par contre, une grande partie des comptes que je suis ne sont dans aucun groupe et re retrouvent dans la colonne “All friends” que je check une fois de temps en temps, rapidement et en diagonale. Si je vois que quelqu’un tweet constatemment des trucs sans intérêt, je l’enlève bien sûr. Si au contraire, c’est toujours pertinent et que je le retweet, il risque d’avoir un upgrade dans un des groupes.

Bref rien de bien compliqué, mais qui permet de suivre un plus grand nombre de personnes et de bénéficier de leur tweets de temps à autre sans manquer les VIP

Reste à espérer que Steph Guérin me suive un jour, mais parti de même, je fais une croix là-dessus

June 28, 2009

Un brutal tour de la ville de Québec pour la 1re édition du Défi des escaliers

escalier_12_petit1 La ville de Québec est particulière à plusieurs égards, mais la présence d’une vingtaine d’escaliers publics pour joindre la basse-ville et la haute-ville est définitivement unique en Amérique.

Les organisateurs du marathon de Québec l’ont saisi, comme bon nombres d’habitants de la ville, et en on fait une course de 15km comprenant 22 escaliers pour un total de plus de 2500 marches.

Je suis certain que même les plus grands explorateurs de la ville trouveront le parcours magnifique et découvriront quelques recoins moins connus de la ville. Pour les touristes, c’est une manière unique de voir Québec, ne serait-ce qu’en parcourir 5-6 km….

Carte du parcours du défi des escaliers

La première édition avait lieu aujourd’hui et plus de 600 personnes se sont présentés au départ. La formule contre-la-montre fût utilisée pour réduire l’engorgement dans les escaliers du parcours et les participants partaient donc en couple à chaque 5 secondes.

Dire que la course est difficile serait un euphémisme dont je me garderai, disons simplement que mon massothérapeute va avoir de la job cette semaine. Je n’ai jamais couru de marathon, mais un demi-marathon est sensiblement plus facile que cette course.

En tant qu’originaire de Québec, j’aurais bien voulu remporté le premier titre, mais j’ai dû me contenter de la 2e position ce qui devrait me forcer à revenir mieux préparé l’an prochain

Allez voir la carte et faîtes un tour unique de Québec !

June 19, 2009

Tips to choose an Online Reputation Monitoring vendor

The Online Reputation Monitoring tools market is growing at a fast pace as more and more company understand and express the need to listen to what’s being said about their market, products and competitors online, evaluate the influence of these conversations and analyze the sentiment expressed.

There’s now a gazillion way to do it, from free mash-up techniques like the one described in my previous post to uber-expensive solutions from media company.

Before evaluating the solutions, one would need some parameters to do so. Here’s a short list half-mine, half-borrowed

Efficient filtering of queries based on language, country, source, date, topic
Depth of coverage
Real-time monitoring
Duplicate elimination
Smart Sentiment analysis (learning with time)
Ability to modify sentiment analysis
Sentiment plus (point in time, trend over time, compared with competitor, overlay with another issue etc.)
Ability to associate timeline with events
Identification, ranking and monitoring of influencers on multiple networks
Ranking based on “social popularity” or social engagement (PostRank)
Comparison to competitive information
Identification of entity and events within the conversation
Easy, dynamic ability to chart and graph analysis of queries
Self-service set up of queries
Multiple User Management
Backward trending (and not just for 30 days!)
Real-time threshold monitoring
Integration with CRM system
Analysis services by experts

I tend to put an heavy emphasis on the last point as so far from my experience, monitoring tools are only used as a first step to decipher the whole conversation and identify influencers while the real value lies in the results of the analysis services offered afterward. Despite great progress in technology, we still need a human with social science skills to make some sense out of all this.

I have evaluated a few software in this field and was preparing some kind of report for a client when I stumbled on a coveted Forester Report : The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms Q1 2009. With my limited resources, I could hardly do better than their evaluation and I was lucky enough to get it for free. And you can get it too, courtesy of Visible Technologies, evaluated in the report.

Only top-tier applications with a minimum of 75% of entreprise-level clients are evaluated in the report. Although they see listening platforms has being in their infancy, I was surprised to see the much-talked about Radian6 platform at the bottom of the ladder. According to Forester’s report, this is due to a lack of

sentiment analysis, NLP, insight generation, and integration and consulting services.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymfony are given as industry leaders based on

sophisticated sentiment analysis capabilities, strong international coverage, and
multilingual support

for the former and on

comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities [...] well complemented by
a strategic and consulting services organization that offers advanced support for understanding
sentiment and influence

for the second.

A slightly older but well-done and complimentary report (with pricing info) on 10 leading online conversation monitoring tool can be found on Ryan MacMillan blog.

What do the actual users/customers of these tools have to say about them ? The best place to look for this might be on … a blog. Read the comments following ReadWriteWeb : The Future of Social Media Monitoring post for some great insights.

The conclusion seems to be that no tool yet offers a complete solution and I would be tempted to think that the greatest tool would be a giant mash-up of many smaller tools and technologies out there. More to come…

Have a good read !

DISCLAIMER : Many of the evaluation points mentionned above come from Anna B. at Organic.

June 12, 2009

GoogleReader + SocialMention + PostRank = ORM for free ;-)

I had been postponing to write this for a couple weeks, but a link shared on PostRank Twitter account left me no choice but to hurry up.

Social Media Monitoring is now an essential part of any brand, corp or product marketing plan. Between tools like Radian6, BuzzMetrics, TechRigy, one can also use free tools like Google Alerts to monitor mentions of keywords or brand name in the news. It’s way too late to get any decent readership with a “How to Monitor Your Brand With Google Alerts” but add a SocialMention.com feed to the mix and you just spiced up an old recipe, allowing monitoring of social media platforms. And everybody likes good free online reputation monitoring tools.

Btw, SocialMention is a great social media search engine developed by Jon Cianciullo in Ottawa.

Social Mention monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

SocialMention also uses Backtype API to monitor blog comments.

So that’s what this guy did and he created a video tutorial to show how to do it. Super simple.

So what I am adding to this ?

Well, one problem with this method (and with most monitoring services) is that you can rapidly get an avalanche of alerts and you will most likely spend a good amount of time flying through the list to see what could be relevant. On top of that, that does not tell you the reach or range of influence of these results. You’ll have to look it up yourself to see if these links where bookmared on delicious, shared on twitter, if they have comments and so on. Lengthy process.

The magic trick ? PostRank by AideRSS.

PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.

Available as a GreaseMonkey Script or a FireFox extension, it will basically gives a 0 to 10 ranking score to any item in your Google Reader List and allows you to filter out result based on their PostRank score. Look at your Google Alerts + SocialMention feed in list mode and instantly know which one are worth looking at, based on the social engagement they generated.

That’s it, a cheap and manageable Online Reputation Management tool. Not perfect, but worth trying.

If you need more info about integrating PostRank with Google Reader, look at this.

EDIT:

Both (mine and Intelligendo) explanation kinda skimp over what you should be monitoring.

Marty Weintraub create a great tutorial on how to do this and how to choose search terms for monitoring

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