Saturday, January 08, 2005

Monitoring Online Communications: Find Out What's Being Written About Your Library

I'll admit it, I'm a latecomer to using automatic, online monitoring tools. I read about PubSub, Google Alerts and other online communications monitoring tools some time ago, but I didn't try any of them out.

If you haven't used any of these, they help you monitor news stories, stories about your library (or blog, business, yourself, etc.), stories about your competition, etc and inform you when something new is posted. Some tools will e-mail you when new hits are found for your search, others offer RSS feeds of new results. I recently set up some PubSub feeds, which resulted in finding some stories that mention OhioLINK that I would never have found otherwise.

If you want a more in-depth look an online monitoring tools, see Robin Good's post on online tracking tools. Or just give one of these tools a try and you'll quickly understand their value.

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