/Seocracy.com/

My curiosity has always been a great asset. I’ve always been interested in the social psychology behind word-of-mouth marketing, group trends, memes, etc. I’ve learned a ton from tracking emerging memes and seeing how/where they spread.

The techniques and discipline applied to researching memes can also be applied to brands and niche specific search queries. Its useful to research this kind of information because it lets you know where your audience is communicating. Knowing where your brand/niche evangelists are communicating is an incredible asset, because they really have their fingers on the pulse of that brand/niche, and people LISTEN to them. By knowing where the evangelists communicate, you are in a position to deal with bad PR before it spins out of control; you’re also in position to exploit and leverage opportunities you might have missed if you were just relying on Google News Alerts, and BlogSearch.

This isn’t just about researching the buzz on social sites like Twitter. I mean, let’s face it, Twitter has a fairly narrow demographic. For example, let’s say you want to know how to best communicate to real estate investors. You better know where the realtors are hanging out on the web. You’ve got to get your hands dirty and identify the popular opinion blogs, the obscure dicussion forums, and so on.

I use alot of the obvious tools to do my research, like google search, blog search, technorati, etc, but, my favorite new tool is BoardReader. It is, hands down, one of the best research tools I’ve used in recent months.

Let’s say I wanted to find out where people are talking about condos in Toronto. I’d goto BoardReader and peform this search

With that one search, I’ve just been given a whole group of new websites to research and monitor. Now I know that people are talking about Toronto Condos on forums such as SkyScraper Forum, and InvestorsHub  and Realestatetalks.com and Cyburbiaforums etc etc etc.

And the best part of this is that BoardReader gives us a list of recent/relevant topics and posts on these forums. This makes it incredibly easy for us to monitor the conversations, find the opinion makers, and connect with our audience through meaningful, relevant and timely communications.