Social media monitoring or listening in the life sciences can be an overwhelming and time consuming task due to the endless possibilities for user-generated content on the web and the urgency by which new information becomes available. With the help of new web-based tools, monitoring just got a little easier. These web-based tools, called social media dashboards, allow you to monitor multiple platforms at one time from one place.
There are several of these dashboards currently available, Threadsy, Seesmic, iGoogle. All have their advantages and disadvantages and I am sure that there are preferences towards one or the other for different reasons. I could spend an entire newsletter reviewing theses. However, for the purpose of length, I will stick to my own preference based on experience.
I find that Netvibes tends to best meet our company needs for social media monitoring. Through the use of widgets, NetVibes allows users to monitor Google Alerts, RSS Feeds (blogs), Google Analytics, Twitter, LinkedIn and much more. It also offers organization in that users can create multiple tabs and dashboards under one account.
As I mentioned there are some disadvantages to all, NetVibes tends to be slow at times and it does have its quirks, but these are outweighed by the fact that it is an extremely useful tool and best of all it’s free. Check it out at Netvibes.