Tools of Tracking and Why You Want to Track.

This past week we discussed the various ways that one can track and monitor information either about specific topics or your own blogs. One of the main tools discussed in our lectures was that of yahoo pipes. Yahoo pipes aggregates information from the web and can be arranged to present it in a fashion easily readable by any user. One of the main forms of tracking that we examined was through the use of search engine RSS feeds in order to keep an up to date record of events on social media sites such as twitter and blogger.

One of the things that I believe we should further examine is why one should want to track all this information? In order for social media to be a valuable tool for the PR community we have to have some method of calculating a return on investment for your client. Simply put, tools like Yahoo pipes help to analyze and create metrics to see how effective your social media campaign can be. Without being able to present this information in a clear and concise fashion, the actual presence of a client's social media campaign becomes hard to judge.

While tracking tools offer great flexibility in finding out the opinion of the populous at large from various locales, being able to measure the impact of your campaign also strikes me as an important use of this technology, one that can greater bridge a gap between client and their pr representatives.

I believe the continued development of metric/tracking tools will allow for the greater introduction of social media campaigns to new clients. What better way to show them the effect social media can have than by showing a business man what he understands the most; numbers, evidence, and ROI.