Angie is also a Search Engine Watch columnist and speaks at national events including SMX, SES, and OMS. Connie is the Community Strategist for the Alterian (formerly Techrigy) SM2 social media monitoring platform. Idea generator, b2b marketing professional, creative director, process engineer and writer at MLT Creative in Atlanta, as well as a mother, friend, sister, daughter, diabetic, crocheter and jazz fan. Few phenomena have ever spread as far and grown as rapidly as social media; obviously, this has tapped into something essential to our nature. What is it? aaker. MORE >>

YouTube 37) YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet (only second to Google). 46) Blog content can be gold for the search engines, but you should write your articles based on what the search engines want, write for your readers. Content Syndication Engines (eHow, eZine Articles, etc…) 84) These are fine to leverage IF you have unique content to publish. Don’t try to republish the articles from your blog on these channels as doing so might cause you to be penalized in the search engines. So, here they are. 4) People are not robots. MORE >>

BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards. BoardTracker is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted. Collecta is a real-time search engine bringing content to you as it’s posted. IceRocket is a real-time blog search engine. MORE >>

It all starts with the Pulse Report that Chevron had produced by Edelman (their PR firm) using their Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool. They used Boolean searches (which are available in most listening engines today) to narrow their searches to only the most relevant posts. Many listening engines provide you with “streams” of data which is great. At a recent BlogWell event I got a chance to hear Robert Raines from Chevron present his Social Media program and how he reports their activity into the Boardroom. Email this to a friend? Share this on Facebook. MORE >>

Alterian – formerly known as SM2 by Techrigy offers a freeimum service that offers up to 5 search terms to monitor for and up to 1000 results, which could be good enough for some small brand with low volume. They offer sentiment analysis, trend comparisons, geographic analysis, theme detection, authority measurement, demographic and, a classification engine similar to Radian6 or Sysomos and the same basic price point of about $500 a month. looked at dozens of dashboards, and reams of reports. Disclaimer – these are my opinions formed by my conversations with these firms). MORE >>