Social Media Marketing uses lots of different applications to bring awareness and build relationships. But there is so much information floating around in the web-o-sphere that you simply can’t digest it all…and why would you?

The question becomes: how do you find salient information about topics of interest? There are a lot of ways to do this, great site specific aggregators like technorati, twitter, google, and then, there is the monster aggregator called Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes is an aggregator that grabs all manner of content from across the web and mashes it up into a feed that you can change and manipulate to give you immediate results.

There are many ways to use Pipes…and I do not consider myself an expert…more of a painfully slow, stealer of good ideas and adapting them as my own, kind of user.

The good news is that is encouraged on Pipes…you can browse for a topic of interest, find an already built Pipe and run it to gather your information.

Recently, I found one that I thought should be a part of everyone’s repertoire…this Pipe, built by Tanner Hobin, is a “social media site aggregator for reputation management”. Yes, you need to know what it being said and by whom, about you, about your company, about your brand, so that you can plan your marketing strategies accordingly.

For fun, I decided to run Paris Hilton:

I added her name at the top of the page and clicked on “run pipe”.

Next thing you know, I am finding post after post about Paris’s escapades…nothing I am sure her publicist doesn’t know about already.

Take a minute to go to this Pipe and run your business. Do you see the same results you already know about or are you (pleasantly?) surprised to see you are showing up in new places on the net?

Managing your brand on the web can be really challenging if you aren’t monitoring your impact and applying your brand with consistency. Using tools like Yahoo Pipes will save you a HUGE amount of time in your search and will pick up things that wouldn’t be caught by a traditional search engine.

Tags: brand management, reputation management, Social Media Marketing, yahoo-pipes

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.