Listen Louder with BackType

I have been playing around with the website BackType today and I think that this could be a really useful tool for doing more “listening” to what others are saying about a topic.  One of the most useful things about social media is to use the tools to “listen” to what other people are saying about your brand, organization, group, issue.  Check out Chris Brogan‘s post – 5 Tools I Use for Listening for some other examples of using social media for listening.

Here is how BackType can help you listen to more:

• You can set up BackType to send you an alert when someone mentions your url or a key word in a comments – this takes you a step beyond just searching blogs, now you can see when your url/keywords are in the comments – which is often where more conversation takes places
• BackType has just launched a feature called BackType Connect - which lets you see all of the conversation around a particular article or post from different platforms like digg, reddit and other social media on one page.  They also have a browswer bookmarklet avaialble that you can add to your browser – so you can quickly click and see the conversations around a particular topic from multiple platforms. 

Some related posts on BackType and social media…

• The Conversation Graph: The Social Life of A Blog Post (beth.typepad.com)
• Restaurants Using Social Media (davidsfinch.com)
• Backtype launches comment tracking tools, gets seeded (venturebeat.com)
• BackType Connects the Conversation Graph (briansolis.com)
• Using Social Media to raise $5,000 for homeless kids and promote eComm ’09 (saunderslog.com)