HOW TO: Create a newstracker with Netvibes

News. There’s a lot of it around, especially online. You can monitor some of this perhaps, but how do you even begin to get a feel for what people are saying in the blogosphere, or on the forums?

And what about pictures?

And what about audio and video?

Netvibes lets you put together your own web page from small ‘web windows’ called widgets. Together, they give you a great overview of the news landscape for a given topic. You can pick and choose what you want to see, and customise each widget to show more or less information.

This is good, but when you share your news tracker, it's great. Many eyes make light work, so set your team up with a Netvibes account and take it in turns to monitor news, or allocate members to certain types of coverage. If someone improves a widget then this benefits the entire team, immediately.

Share more. If you’re monitoring on behalf of clients, why not let them in on the act? That they’re seeing online information about themselves and their competitors is only half the story: the other half is that you’ve impressed them with your technical know-how.

Share more. You can keep all this private – but why not go public? If you think you’re good enough, then why not show everyone what you’re monitoring, and for whom? Sure, it takes courage to share. But in a world of wikinomics, the returns can be enormous.

How long will this take me?

At first this may take an hour or so, simply because you’re getting the hang of it. After that you should be able to put together a decent tracker in half an hour, especially as you start to adapt trackers you’ve already created.

What do I need to know first?

You need to have identified the keywords you’ll be searching on, and to have built up search queries from them. It would also benefit you to know a bit about Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

You also need a Netvibes account. It’s quick and painless to sign up.

And, just to cover all the bases here, you need to have a clear idea of the kind of news you want to cover, and why. You’re going to get quite a few choices, so be clear on what you’re trying to achieve.

Setting up the page

1. In Netvibes, click the + icon to open a new tab.
2. Name the tab.
3. Click the downward arrow next to the tab name.
4. Click the number of columns you want.
   • As a rule of thumb, if you’re just monitoring for one client or one general topic, three columns is a good balance between clutter and clarity.
   • If you’re monitoring a client plus competition, then a neat trick is to set up four columns, with the leftmost column for the client and the other three for its top three competitors. In this way you have a matrix in which you can see all the information in one go (very much like the matrix in the post about how to identify keywords in fact).
5. Click the red x icon to the right of the screen to close the layout panel.

Adding qualitative content

To monitor what people are saying or sharing, the most useful Netvibes widget is the feed widget. You can use it to set up all sorts of online coverage.

Here’s how you use it to set up a Google News search for Porter Novelli:

1. Go to Google News and search for “Porter Novelli”.
2. After the results are displayed, find the RSS link.
3. Right-click the RSS link.
4. In the small menu that appears next to your cursor, click Copy shortcut.
5. Return to Netvibes.
6. Click the ‘Add a feed’ link.
7. Paste the feed address into the address field.
8. Click ‘Add Feed’.
9. After the widget has been created, drag and drop it to where you want it on the page.
10. Mouse over the widget title and click the Edit link to change the type and amount of information displayed.

That’s it. There are plenty more examples below. To use them, just follow the steps above, replacing the source in step one with the source listed below.

To monitor news coverage

• News headlines – Google News or Yahoo News
• News audio/video – Yahoo News - run your query, then click the News videos link
• News photos – Yahoo News - run your query, then click the News photos link

To monitor financial news

• Financial news headlines - Yahoo Finance – get a quote, and the RSS link is under ‘Headlines’

To monitor social news

• Social news - Digg

To monitor the blogosphere

• Technorati or Google Blog Search

To monitor the financial blogosphere

• Blog posts – Yahoo Finance – get a quote, and the RSS link is under ‘Financial Blogs’

To monitor microblogging

• Tweets – Tweetscan (enables you to search Twitter)

To monitor forums

• Forum mentions – Boardreader

To monitor social videos

The premier video sharing site is YouTube. It needs a slightly different approach, because you can’t access feeds from its interface. Instead, you have to paste an address directly into a feed widget.

So, to set up a widget for Porter Novelli on YouTube, click the ‘Add a feed’ link, then paste this feed address into the address field:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq="porter novelli"

Then just continue from step 5 above, simply replacing the “porter novelli” query with your query.

To monitor social bookmarks

The premier social bookmarking site is del.icio.us, and it uses tag searches rather than search queries. Fortunately, you can still use the Netvibes RSS feed widget.

So, to set up a widget for Porter Novelli on del.icio.us, click the ‘Add a feed’ link, then paste this feed address into the address field:
http://del.icio.us/tag/porternovelli

Then just continue from step 5 above.

To search for a different tag, simply replace the porternovelli tag with your tag.

To monitor social photos

The premier photo sharing site is Flickr, and it also uses tag searches, like del.icio.us.

So, to set up a widget for Porter Novelli on Flickr, click the ‘Add a feed’ link, then paste this feed address into the address field:
feed://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=porternovelli&format=rss_200

Then just continue from step 5 above.

To search for a different tag, simply replace the porternovelli tag with your tag.

Adding quantitative content

Qualitative is good, but if you monitor how many people are having conversations then you start to notice patterns in the general online buzz. In reality, you need both.

To monitor blogosphere buzz

Here’s how you would monitor Porter Novelli’s blogosphere buzz:

1. Go to Technorati and search for “Porter Novelli”.
2. After the results are displayed, find the blog buzz chart, about midway down the page to the right.
3. Copy the image’s address. The way you do this depends on your browser. In Internet Explorer, right-click the image, then in the small menu that appears next to your cursor, click Properties, then copy the image’s address.
4. Return to Netvibes.
5. Search for the widget called imagemodule.
6. Click the imagemodule widget.
7. Paste the image address into the address field.
8. Click Add to my page.

To monitor forum buzz

Here’s how you would monitor Porter Novelli’s forum buzz:

1. Go to Boardreader and search for “Porter Novelli”.
2. After the results are displayed, find the blog buzz chart, about midway down the page to the right.
3. Click the ‘more graphs’ link.
4. Configure the chart – the small size is usually the best fit for Netvibes.
5. Below the chart, click the ‘Html code’ link.
6. Return to Netvibes.
7. Click Essential widgets, and locate the HTML widget.
8. Click the widget.
9. Paste the HTML into the Source field.
10. Click Add to my page.

Speeding things up

You might find this a bit slow-going at first, but you will pick it up. It becomes much quicker when you start adapting trackers you’ve already put together in the past.

Also, a top tip: duplicate widgets on your tab. This makes it much quicker to put together because you can edit the copied widget rather than create a new one each time. To do this, mouse over the widget’s title, click the downward arrow next to the Edit link, and click ‘Duplicate this module’.

OK, so it probably should say ‘Duplicate this widget’, but I’m not going to quibble...

Comments

[Mat Morrison]

Good stuff: take a look at this tracker we built for ourselves using this method:

http://www.netvibes.com/porternovelli

[Mat Morrison]

Although would be good to see some screengrabs here...

[Mat Morrison]

Mike Manuel has written a really useful overview of where this kind of thing fits into over at Media Guerilla:

How to Create a Social Media Monitoring Strategy

(via Adam Metz)

[Brendan]

Regarding http://www.netvibes.com/porternovelli, very flattered that you still class me as a PN blogger but not strictly true any more...