Internet Marketing ABC

If you are active in a certain market, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening. You want to know what people are talking about, so that you can enter the conversation that’s going on in their minds.

Google has released a new tool that helps you to do so, to quickly get an overview about what currently are hot topics that people are highly interested in:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

It’s pretty cool, because you can visually go through all kinds of news messages from different sites (like BBC, New York Times, WSJ, and so on), and you actually get to see snapshots of hot topics.

Check it out:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Have you ever heard of “project echelon”? It’s a favourite of conspiracy theorists, and it says that the government has a system that up that monitors every phone call made on earth and filters out certain words automatically (like “bomb”, etc.).

I am pretty sure that some Big Brother is actually watching us – but with this list of Web2.0 monitoring tools, you can set up your own “Echelon” of the social media landscape. Every time somebody talks about you, or your subject of expertise, you will get notified if you want to.

Now, be aware – you can easily make yourself crazy and stop any progress you’re making in your business by listening to all these conversations. You really don’t want to become a huge aggregator of everything, because it will just cause information overload. But if you set these things up selectively, and spend about 30 minutes a day just going through your “daily data”, you will have your finger on the pulse of your market better than 99% of the competition in your market.

But keep in mind: the most powerful tool is still Google Alerts.