Bill BairdHere’s a list of research resources you can use to develop your Social Media strategy.  These enable you to gain a better understanding of what your competitors are doing on their blogs and sites;  what influential bloggers and customers are saying about you; and what topics are being discussed in your industry.  

If, however, you’re doing research to determine what SM features to provide on your own site, you need to turn to a different resource:  your customers.  You need to ask them how they use social media, and talk with them about their needs so that you can create an SM strategy that meets those needs.

But if your goal is to better understand what’s happening in your marketplace, and what your competitors are doing, these sites are vital resources for ongoing insight:

GOOGLE BLOGS. This helps you find blog posts with the keywords you provide so that you can identify where people are talking about you and your market (and find out what they’re saying).

GOOGLE GADGETS is the best place to tell which widgets are the most popular, because when you find the gadget, it shows the number of pageviews it has gotten.  WIDGETBOX also provides a wide array of gadgets … but not the counts.

BLOGPULSE is a simple, free tool which identifies trends from the blogosphere for the frequency of occurrence of keywords which you provide, as well as providing links to the actual blogs where those conversations are occurring.  The quantitative data is not detailed however; it’s just a chart.

NIELSEN BUZZMETRICS is the Ferrari of analytic tools, providing a robust package of functionality … for a price, of course.   Tools provide rich detail about what consumers are saying about your brand and your competitors’, how many are talking, in how many places, and where it’s happening.

RADIAN6 is the BMW to Buzzmetrics’ Ferrari.  You set up an account and define keywords, and it starts collecting, tracking and analyzing content, reporting the results in a slick dashboard of ongoing daily metrics about what’s being discussed, where, and so on.  It also enables you to identify who the Influencers are so that you can reach out to them and form a relationship.

ADDICT-O-MATIC is a Free “gee whiz!” tool.  You enter a keyword and it provides a dashboard of the major social media sites showing short snippets of what’s being discussed relating to that keyword.  Downside: it tracks the big sites – but not the niche, targeted ones.

BUZZLOGIC tracks the bloggers who are influencing your market, identifying which ones have the highest “influence” (i.e. traffic), as well as the posts on those blogs which affect you, so that you can keep track of who you need to establish relationships with and what they are saying.

iGOOGLE and GOOGLE READER are personal tools you can use to create a central place where you can view RSS feeds from your top-priority blogs on a regular basis.  They’re a great place to simply monitor the industry stories and blog postings that are of most interest to you (so that you can “get in” on experiencing Web 2.0 personally).

So … what other resources do YOU know about?  Please leave a comment below and share your knowledge with the rest of the community!

Yours Truly,

Bill