Wearing my marketing hat for a moment, I am tickled by how easy it is to get a view into the real-time, person-on-the-street reception of the free Job Search Tips eBook we recently published.
I am no whiz at some of the new tools out there -- so I'll share with you the 3 novice-level things I did today to see what was happening with the book.
1. Did a Twitter search. I immediately saw the book referenced in tweets and blogs (including number of retweets). Have you seen the Twitter Trackbacks yet? It tells you how many tweets the content had, and also lets you sort views of the tweets by "top influencers." Cool (and, of course, free).
2. Went to Convotrack -- LOVE THIS!! So easy (and free) to use. Drag this Google finding for Convotrack to your browser toolbar. Go to the URL of choice. (Here is the URL to our eBook.) Click on Convotrack from your toolbar, and see what people are saying and tweeting in real time!
3. and then, I did the old obvious ... Googled the name of the book -- It has 864,000 references to the book as of this moment! (Are you kidding me? It was released about 10 days ago, over the dead zone of Christmas and New Year's Eve.) I then Googled a name similar to the name of the book (using "by" instead of "from" in the title), and found 144,000 references to the book. Granted, some of these search findings are not for the book-- but I had to go to the 4th page of search before I found any finding that wasn't an exact reference to this free eBook.
Geez, finding out what my husband wanted for Christmas should have been that easy!
I should also note that we set up a bit.ly URL so that we can track downloads. While this is showing amazing data, I suspect it tells only part of the story as more and more people posted hyperlinks directly to the exact URL, or via a URL shortener of their choice.
... At some point, I'll request a more formal report from our web team (who run EMC.com) on the precise number of visits and downloads of the book.
---------------- Talk Back -------------------
Was this helpful or interesting? What tips do you have to share for tracking reception of on-line content?
-- Polly Pearson
http://www.pollypearson.com
@pollypearson
ShareThis
