There are many web monitoring and listening platforms, both free and commercial options, available online. The majority of these companies advertise their ability to monitor and scour hundreds of thousands of sources simultaneously. These turnkey solutions allow the user to submit lists of keywords and the platform returns thousands of hits from blogs, message boards, social media websites, news websites, etc. This type of solution works great for projects that simply need to track mentions of specific keywords, particularly keywords and sources that are used globally. However, this type of turnkey model using a standard database doesn’t work for everybody.
Many users need to define their own dataset rather than blindly trusting one provided to them. In this post, we give examples of who should be defining their own data set, the value of monitoring your own data, and available custom monitoring solutions.
