After reading Susan Payton’s post, How to : Add Blogger Outreach to Your PR Plan, I noticed that unless you have a team of people working at monitoring sites it is difficult to properly monitor all the social media sites and blogs because there are many that need to be checked but not enough time to do it in. But for a company monitoring Web sites could be what makes or breaks their brand identity. Blogs and unconventional news sites are becoming more popular by the second, it seems, and thanks to the first amendment they can write about whatever they want.
But how does a company effectively monitor all the sites that may be buzzing about it?
Easy. Dashboard baby!
After looking at Brian Solis’s post, The Brand Dashboard: Bringing Conversation to Life, I realized how convenient a dashboard could be to any frequent Internet user. Dashboards bring all the sites to one place so they can easily be monitored by a single person. A company could have a page dedicated to all the blogs that have its name in the blog. Or have Twitter updates that is programmed to search for the companies name or product.
Solis talks about companies using dashboards to make monitoring sites easier. But I am a college student and I know I visit almost 50 sites a day just from studying and occasionally checking my social networks. Then I realize that I was only going to increase the number of sites I viewed each day as more and more things become available through the Internet.
So I was thinking that if you are wanting to monitor blogs and social media sites the best way is to make a dashboard so you can have all site updates all in one place. Sounds like heaven for a heavy browser who has many accounts. With a dashboard you can choose how to view all your updates. You can catergorize, move site updates in one easy touch of a button, customize your page to fit your personality. It is the Internet the way you like it because in a few easy steps you change anything. The dashboard has the ability to change as quickly as the fickle mind of the average person in 2010.
So to see how effective dashboards are I decided to make my dashboard customized to my needs. I went to NetVibes.com because my social media professor, Bill Handy, uses NetVibes and considering he looks at these kinds of things all day I decided to trust his instincts and try NetVibes.
NetVibes lets you customize your background immediately after sign up for an account. The first thing I noticed was the search capability from Google at the top. Even if someone like me can’t remember where I stored something I can find it quickly just by searching it. Once an account is made, the user can make as many dashboards as they need. So if they need a personal dashboard and a business dashboard for all their work sites then they don’t have to create a new account. It also allows you to switch from dashboard to dashboard with ease.
Each dashboard has tabs at the top, which pull up new pages. This makes it easy to categorize your interests and only see the sites for one particular interest at one time. But many dashboard creation sites have these features but they don’t have the ability to move the site sections around on each page. This is what puts NetVibes above the rest in my book because I am a loyal site visitor but I like discovering new sites as well. So if I am browsing and I find a site I would like to monitor a little more I can easily create a section for the site and position it higher on the dashboard page.
These kinds of capabilities show that NetVibes was thinking about what kind of features does an average Web browser needs. We want choice in what we view. We want personal customization. And we want the power to be in our hands instead of letting others decide what is important to us.
