Top 5 Listening Tools for Social Media

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time listening – to what others are saying online; on Facebook, on Twitter, in blogs, and in person. I’ve also been reading a lot about the nature of Storytelling, both for entertainment purposes, and for organizations and businesses.

I recently spent a weekend in Montreal at their Storytelling Festival, and came away Story Happy.

According to the National Storytelling Network, the listener has a key role to play in Story:

In storytelling, the listener imagines the story. In most traditional theatre or in a typical dramatic film, on the other hand, the listener enjoys the illusion that the listener is actually witnessing the character or events described in the story.

The storytelling listener’s role is to actively create the vivid, multi-sensory images, actions, characters, and events—the reality—of the story in his or her mind, based on the performance by the teller and on the listener’s own past experiences, beliefs, and understandings. The completed story happens in the mind of the listener, a unique and personalized individual. The listener becomes, therefore, a co-creator of the story as experienced.

So in Story telling, the actual act of telling the story, the fourth wall of the stage disappears, and all the magic happens in the listener’s mind. This is what makes the art of storytelling so very different than other forms of art.

This act of listening is also very important in our new media driven society, as is evident in the plethora of tools that are popping up as a way to keep track of the ‘noise’ online. We sign up for google alerts, anxiously gobbling up and recycling nuggets of information ourselves, until the novelty wears off and our inboxes are filled with heaps of daily offerings of the keywords of our choosing. We use www.search.twitter.com to listen to comments about our businesses and products, in order to better converse with our customers, and to quell any potential PR disasters that might be brewing online. And we keep track in Twitter-related programs of a number of keywords so that we may again recycle, reuse, rehash, and sometimes, re-inspire ourselves with the words of others.

My Top 5 Listening Tools for Social Media are as follows:

1. Seesmic/Tweetdeck categories. I love both of these programs, I use Seesmic on my laptop, and Tweetdeck on my iPod. With them, I seem to be able to search an unlimited amount of words or phrases across the Twitterverse.
2. Google alerts: Despite my griping above, they are an industry standard when it comes to listening to the online world.
3. Search.Twitter.com: a great way to search what others are saying on Twitter
4. Social Oomph: The best part of this program (although I haven’t used it) is being able to schedule tweets. However, I am starting to see a trend as we become more ADD online, where I don’t update my search queries anymore (come on! That requires opening another tab on my already overworked Firefox!). Good for the beginner, but I prefer to do my searches within Seesmic or Tweetdeck now.
5. Socialmention.com: A new tool I heard about last week so I haven’t had that much time to play with it yet. Basically, it searches across the web; in Twitter, facebook, and on blogs.