One of the most frustrating elements of any Internet listening project can be setting up the search terms that will result in the most relevant data. If you’re not careful, valuable time can be wasted on a bad query while irrelevant results pour in. (For an example of bad queries, look at this post.)

Your search is more than just a search. It’s the first step of a research project. Our job is to make your project successful, so we’ve had a lot of experience setting up and testing search queries to give clients the best possible statistics.

Here are the steps you need to take to define and refine your query:

1. Know what you’re looking for—have a defined topic.

If you went into a library and told the librarian you were looking for stuff on history, the first question any good librarian would ask is “What kind of history?” Otherwise, you’d be poring through the entire breadth of human history just to find information on poodle skirts.

It’s all about narrowing down the field. If you want to find out whether a used 2003 Ford Expedition truck is a good buy or not, you’re one step ahead of the game because you’re looking for a specific make, model, and year. A search for “Ford” isn’t going to do you any good. You have to define what you are looking for specifically because the search won’t do that for you. It gives you everything.

2. Think like a machine—narrow your topic into a concept.

Let’s say you want to run a query about politicians who put a lot of political pork in the bills they submit to Congress. A machine doesn’t know what “pork” means. Machine language would happily spit back recipes for baconated grapefruit with the same enthusiasm as information about a spending bill. You’re liable to get a lot of irrelevant results unless you bear that in mind.

3. Search for what people are saying, not what you want them to say.

This is a common pitfall. If you are looking to define what customers who frequent movie concession stands are saying about the products there, don’t search for “concessions.” Chances are, few of the relevant URLs will contain this word. Use common language. You’ll get better results if you think about how people actually talk.

People are more likely to be talking about the popcorn, hot dogs, or Cokes that they had at the movies. They may also talk about prices. All of these are important words to consider.
Another example: Use “laid off” or “lay off” before you use “unemployed.”

4. Find them and learn their language.

Sometimes you have to do a little research before you start. You wouldn’t go to a mommy blog to find out what people think of the public option. Do a test queries to find out where the conversations about your topic are happening.

Now it’s time to find out specifically what’s being said and how it relates to your concept. Read the blogs that cover your topic. Even better—use a tool like semantic analysis to learn the language that your targets are using. Now that you know the lingo, it’s time to refine your queries.

5. Know that you may not find what you’re looking for.

Expectation management is important. As shocking as it may be, there probably aren’t a lot of people talking about your original Cap’n Crunch/James Bond fan fiction or the rubberized oscillating spammer widget that you marketed to the Amish.

That could mean many things. Are you not getting the right results because you haven’t used the right terms to find them or because the results you want aren’t there? If nobody is talking about your widget, look at it as an opportunity! Running a query on popular Internet widgets might reveal to you that the Amish aren’t real big on computers—and that’s valuable information.

A new ebook compiled by Seth Godin is being passed around the Web right now, and it contains some really useful and reflective thoughts. In our workday, we often get bogged down by heavy workloads and sometimes feel like there’s never a time to look up and take stock of what you have and what you’re doing with it.

The end of the year is the perfect time to slow down and consider this.

The book is available as a free download and is entitled What Matters Now. It features contributions from forward-thinkers like Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mitch Joel, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, and new tech thinker Kevin Kelley.

Each author was asked to pick a provocative word and riff on it for a little bit. Besides deep thoughts on business and life in general, there is also useful information for brands looking into the future. This quote ties into the idea of giving away an ebook for free:

When talking of the shifting concept of ’social media’ customer service, Vaynerchuck’s quote was particularly interesting: “I believe the ‘thank you’ economy will become the norm in 2010 and beyond, and brands that fail to adjust will be left out in the cold.”

Have a great holiday and please download or browse What Matters Now below:

As humans, we make sense of the world around us by observing relationships and making judgments.

We are spatial beings—it’s as simple as that.

Show me a long list of data with a lot of numbers and statistics, and I’ll eventually be able to make some sense of it, but show me a picture that relates to my 3D world and I’ll instantly be able to understand what you’re talking about.

IKEA has the right idea. Ever looked at one of their instruction booklets? (See right.)

Mapping influence is an important part of any company’s brand management. Finding out the most influential portals where people are talking about your brand is essential.

Beyond merely keeping track of the conversation, companies can engage with the most relevant communities and create advocates, loyalists, and evangelists.

A virtualization of the online conversation surrounding your brand draws on your spatial intuition. Instead of looking an endless, flat list of URLs linked up to a damaging customer complaint, for example, you can actually see all of those sites spatially gathered around the offending URL and intuitively understand the big picture.

Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus works the same way in mapping word relationships. (See right.)

For companies, there’s no more efficient tool for analyzing a campaign or customer service response. Let’s say an angry blogger started a chain of negative sentiment that spread throughout the Internet like a wildfire.

With a virtualization, your company can identify the URL as a top influencer and stop the negative sentiment in its tracks by making things right before it blows up to a crisis proportion.

This kind of chronological progression of a message is something that is hard to see in a flat list of sites. The virtualization is showing you more of your data in a more manageable way by wrapping it into 3D dimension that is immediately familiar.

One can even step outside the realm of social media and map offline databases to visualize connections in areas such as call center transcripts, point-of-sale data, unstructured market research, campaign metrics, and beyond.

In Spark, each sphere represents a single URL in your brand’s ecosystem and is color-coded to reflect the average sentiment of that web page. (Green, red, and gray represents positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.) Each connection is color-coded to reflect inbound (red), outbound (blue), and bi-directional (green) linkage.

Highly influential sites are pulled towards the center of the network, while less influential sites are pushed outward. High traffic communication channels are easy to pick out and tightly interlinked sites are clustered close together.

A virtualization takes this massive amount of data and maps it into a spatial model that makes sense. To see details, click on any sphere to see the title, URL, number of inbound/outbound connections, and influence ranking. You can delve into the virtualization further by adjusting the view any way you like.

Spark’s Virtualization

Click the image below to view the virtualization for local event Old Shawnee Days.

We gave a presentation at the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association luncheon on Tuesday at Figlio Tower. It’s a basic introduction to social media and the many ways to measure the metrics associated with it. We’d love to hear feedback, so please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Do you know the influence of your company’s official website in your online community? In this video, Whitney shows us how a company URL can be the center of your ecosystem.

Learn more about the Miller High Life one-second Super Bowl ad by reading our case study. You can also view this video on our Facebook page.