We’ve added new sources, filtering, and more!
Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Friday, August 29th, 2008
We’ve been busy tinkering under the hood this past week! We’re very pleased to add new features to our service, and in particular, Flickr and YouTube searches! Now, when you track your keywords, you’ll get results from these popular photo- and video-sharing sites as well.
You may also choose to filter which sources you get your results from, as per the screenshot (click to enlarge):
We’ve also fixed the +Buzz feature, where you may add your own results to the list. We’re continuing to build out the FAQ and Help sections on GetSatisfaction, please let us know if you have a question or found a bug. Thanks for your feedback, and we hope you’ll enjoy this update!
Need help? GetSatisfaction!
Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Friday, August 22nd, 2008
We’ve started creating a FAQ and help section on GetSatisfaction, the “people-powered customer service site.” Over the next few weeks, we’ll be adding new questions and answers, and will build up a How-To section. For example, here’s a how-to on adding a colleague to your account.
GetSatisfaction is also a great way for you to submit your questions and bugs. If you need help with something or see something that’s not working, just submit it here and we’ll get to it. Better yet, someone from the community may be able to answer the question before we get to it. This way, we’ll all learn together … and we love that!
Twitter Search
Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Friday, August 15th, 2008
What a great first week! We’d like to thank everyone who signed up to the public Beta release.
As expected, some of you found some bugs, which we fixed as quickly as we could. There are still a couple of issues we’re aware of and which will take a bit longer to resolve. One of them is the +Buzz box, which we know we have to redo. Another is some funny stuff the CSS is doing, which we’ll be addressing.
We’ve also received lots of new ideas and great suggestions. We’ve documented all of them and will revisit them often as we plan out our development map. There’s some very exciting stuff we’d love to do.
But first things first: Twitter Search is on!
We’ve been talking with the Twitter team to make sure we were complying with the correct use of their API, and we’re glad to say got the green light this afternoon!
What does this mean? In addition to mentions in blogs, you may now also track your mentions within the growing active and passionate Twitter community. Because Twitter is the most widely adopted micro-blogging and public messaging service, news often breaks there first. With its ease of use and brevity (tweets are limited to 140 characters), people often turn to Twitter first to send their good news … and their rants.
As Brian Solis, Principal of the PR agency Futureworks, describes:
“The crossroads of traditional PR and Social Media is on an inevitable path to a very public boiling point. In the realm of Social Media, conversations are king …. Twitter is one of the most powerful conversation tools among early adopters.”
The following screen shows what a persistent Twitter search in StartPR looks like. Shortly after we announced we turned Twitter Search on (bottom-most result below) this afternoon, we started seeing results for one of the topics we’re tracking, the keyword “StartPR” (the first three results below). Mentions in StartPR are listed in reverse chronology, with most recent results at the top:
The availability of Twitter Search made our own lives easier and we’d love to hear what you think.
Oh … and if you’re on Twitter, you may find us at: @StartPR, @brbreslin, @xavierb, and @alexdc. If you’re new to Twitter, please sign up and say hi!
There’s always a first mention!
Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
So the cobbler’s children have no shoes? We think that’s a tired cliché.
As the creators of a service to track mentions in social media, we track our own keywords using StartPR. This post describes how go about it …
So we log in throughout the day to see whether anyone has blogged about us. The screenshot below shows a dashboard of results for our permanent search on “startpr”. Among the mentions we found, these are the results we’ve “Favorited” (bookmarked):
This is handy because all we had to do was log in throughout the day to check on the progress of these posts, as well as to see if there were new ones. As we read the blog posts and made notes, our activity got recorded in the dashboard.
One of the posts got on Digg, and we came back often to see whether more people had dugg the post. Did someone comment on it? I also checked to see whether Brian or Xavier had assigned me any tasks related to our results today. It was very easy to do as it only required me to login. One of our friends, Fabrice Epelboin, “likened it to a mailbox for blog posts … now you can manage your PR like you do your mail!”. We like the analogy … what do you think?
We’d like to thank Bilal at StartupMeme, who blogged us first and offfered this insightful review:
The most important ingredient of the social web is conversations, StartPR lets you coordinate your teams response to bloggers in order to engage them and build solid relationships over time. In addition to engaging with bloggers and media types, the service enables you to engage with your clients and users who are arguably the most important people for you. StartPR provides features to keep track of your interactions with your clients and whether or not you have been able to satisfy them.
We’ve included a link good for 250 Beta accounts to StartPR in the comments to the post.
By the way, the post got dugg, and we’d appreciate your vote if you can spare a few seconds of your time:
We also got mentioned by KillerStartups.com, which tracks all the new media services. We know it’s a lot to ask, but we would appreciate your vote at KillerStartups as well!
Finally, we got reviewed by Kaye D. Sweetser, Ph.D., APR, who received an invite from the respected PR and social media Professor Robert French of Auburn University. In her thoughtful post, “Gathering the conversation,” Kaye shares her likes, her dislikes, and what she calls a “wouldn’t it be cool” list. We appreciate the feedback - it’s how we learn.
By the way, wouldn’t it be cool if all brands tracked their online mentions?
What are the important keywords you should be tracking? How do you track them today?
![[Bloglines]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")
![[Facebook]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")
![[Google]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")
![[Email]](http://www.startpr.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png "Theres Always A First Mention!")