Thursday, August 30, 2007

del.icio.us: digital influence

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has pulled together his list of 26 free "buzz monitoring" tools. (Free is good.) Most are familiar, but it's still nice for someone -- Andy -- to have pulled his favorites together.

Unfortunately, I was hoping that Board Tracker didn't suck as hard as Board Reader but, alas, according to Kaitlyn, it does.

Anyone out there know of a better search engine for message boards?

And - anyone out there a regular Keotag user?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hmm.
What did you find disappointing in BoardTracker?

abf said...

Oy, the guilt. I should be nicer on my blog. Anyway, the problem with Board Reader is that it's not nearly exhaustive enough. It's not clear why some boards are being searched and others are not. So, you don't really feel, at the end of the day, that you have a good sense of the true landscape.

I asked if Board Tracker was any better and the response was that it had the same issues.

Anonymous said...

I've used both for several years in my online brand intelligence work, and much like blog searching, you just can't rely on either one to pull back comprehensive results.

While I use both Reader and Tracker as tools, I actually prefer Google as a first stop. My key words + forums or + "message boards" bring back just as much, if not more, relevant content than either board search engine. Even with all three, you still don't get close to everything out there.

With Tracker, it seems that no matter what my search terms are, I always end up with content from places like BodyBuilding.com, Time Bomb 2000, Pirate 4X4 and Ultimate Guitar.com... Seriously, try it out.

abf said...

Kaitlyn discriminates against guitar players, bodybuilders and um, pirate lovers?, all in one swoop.

Anonymous said...

Damn straight. My discrimination knows no bounds. Let's not forget about those Low Carb Friends and Sean Hannity forums either...