Another massive challenge in working social media is how to setup your listening dashboard. Most of us can't afford Radian6 (the grandaddy of social monitoring dashboards) so we have to make due with other tools. Here are a couple of my favorite listening dashboards using Free tools.

iGoogle

You'll notice tabs on the left side, which provide new pages of readers and widgets on my different topics. And then everything else is a widget. If you have a GMail account you've got iGoogle, you just need to set it up. My iGoogle page is my starting point and rally point during the day. I load this page over and over. I have used a widget to feed my G-Mail into the center of the page so I can kill both email and news/updates on one page. The widgets for iGoogle are limitless. And you can create a widget from any RSS feed.

TIP: Another great feature of iGoogle, is you can send an entire page of widgets (a complete listening page) to another Google user or a team of colleagues.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed has an amazing aggregation tool known as Groups. Above you can see a healthcare feed that I have created by subscribing my Healthcare-Firehose to a number of healthcare news sources. Then you can feed this entire RSS stream back into iGoogle as a widget. If I'm ever at a loss for an idea about healthcare, I check this widget.

(Note: If you are interested in healthcare, here is the link to the Healthcare Firehose.)

Here's what the Friendfeed sources page looks like. This is where you add new streams of news from almost any kind of source.

TIP: You can use search.twitter.com to search Twitter for various topics or hashtags. Then you can create an RSS feed of that search that will bring you new search information on a regular basis.

Tweetdeck

As the defacto Twitter management tool (since Twitter bought them) Tweetdeck uses columns to filter your incoming tweetstream into manageable chunks.

I use a priority focus from left to right using Tweetdeck's columns. Left is CLOSE those people and tweets I never want to miss. Next is Social Media Pros, a bit wider group of people writing about and working in social media. Then my own personal search, so I don't miss any mentions. And then comes All Friends, which is my column of all the people I follow. Further to the right I have very targeted columns based on client work or specific interests of the moment. (Note: Tweetdeck can stream your columns so they update as people post, but I find the urgency of the moving tweets more than I can stand. I check Twitter with Tweetdeck, and I update the columns manually, when I am done reading the previous posts.)

WordPress Hybrid Listening Blog

Then you can build a larger listening system using WordPress. For this example I was doing an social media listening program for a leading Cloud Services vendor. I built this site using several Friendfeed groups and feeds, as well as creating some original "cloud" content.

Whatever you use, it is critical to develop a process for filtering through all of the possible news about your topic of interest. By submerging yourself in the datastream (sometimes called the firehose, since the stream is huge and never ceasing) you will learn and become more knowledgable about your topic.

And that's really the key to social media: listening, learning, and responding with ever-more educated responses.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://uber.la/2011/07/social-media-dashboard/

The Disciplines of Social Media:

• The 10th Discipline of Social Media; Socializing Your Content Effectively 
• The 9th Discipline of Social Media: Listening. Building Your Social Media Dashboard
• The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging with Delicious, ReFinding Your Links
• The 7th Discipline of Social Media; KLOUT, the New Measure of Influence
• The 6th Discipline of Social Media: Slideshare Is Great for Marketing
• The 5th Discipline of Social Media; Story, Voice, and Connective Threads
• The First 4 Disciplines of Social Media: Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

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• Apple vs Dell: The Summer Promo Deals In Your Inbox
• The Science of the Share; Why Social Discovery Gives Us a Rush
• Social Media Is More Fun Than Googling It: Why Do We Ask Questions on Social Media?

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