Some of our clients currently asks us for Dashboard solutions for Monitoring purposes. Here is a bunch of good practices for building such tools.

What is it :
A web page build by the agency with a selection of RSS feeds to help the client to get a view on what is said about him, the challengers, inside the main media targets on the web.

Benefits for the client :
Bring an immediate view on relevant information directly impacting the business of the client

Recommended tools :
I recommend the use of welcome page such as Netvibes.

Easier to understand for beginners, uses tabs, with a clean and slick ajax interface

Other tools available :

• http://www.portaneo.com/solutions/en/opensource.php (an open source solution you can host on a server – for internal resource, for instance)
• http://www.webwag.com/startup/
• http://www.pageflakes.com/
• http://www.yourminis.com/
• http://www.protopage.com/

Which RSS feeds to include :

• I first recommend to use rss feeds from search engine to track what is said about a specific client / challenger
• Search from Google News – you can choose to display the news limited to a language / country. Be sure to display the news ranked by date (not relevancy). An RSS feed is dynamically created on such page.
• Search from Google blog search – works exactly like Google News – as an alternative, Twingly is definitely a good solution to look at, especially if you have issues with spam on blogs (splogs).
• Search from Twitter : you can track keywords on Twitter based on the language. But since many people uses english on Twitter, it is often more relevant to filter the Twitter search based on the geography. Define for example the center of a country (For example, the center of France would be around Clermont-Ferrand – you’ll just have to indicate the distance to the FR boundaries – around 600 km).

Keywords :
As always, it’s all about the keywords and their relevancy.

• If you’ll choose a keyword too wide, the number of irrelevant results will lead to too much data. If it’s too narrow, not enough
• Using operator (for instance “security” AND “Technology” OR “IT”) might help to narrow down the number of results and lead to better insights.
• Again, the use of inverted commas ” ” is definitely the top trick to use for such searches.

Additionnal resources

• http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-01-29-netvibes-the-new-social-media-dashboard
• http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/04/06/the-one-page-social-media-dashboard/
• http://blog.netvibes.com/ogilvy-pr-offers-social-media-dashboard-with-netvibes/
• http://www.thedailyinfluence.com/

Any other feedback or experience to share is more than welcome 🙂

[EDITED] Some Text 100 references

Following Jeremy’s request, some additionnal references :

• Text 100 FR internal page : http://www.netvibes.com/text100fr
• The Novell page for Identity and Management topics : http://www.netvibes.com/novell
• We also built a page for IBM Spain, but this page isn’t currently public.