The Chrome extension makes it easy to highlight a web page, upload a PDF, or organize your WebNotes with the click of a button.  Best of all, if you browse to a page you’ve annotated in the past, your notes will show up automatically! No more having to click a bookmarklet every time you visit a page!

Our extension is currently in Beta, so please be sure to let us know if you run into any issues or have suggestions for improvement.  And, if you like the new extension, make sure to rate it!

• Commenting tool – Want to add a comment to a section of highlighted text?  No problem!  Just right-click the highlight and choose “Add/Edit Comment”.  You can edit, move, and resize comments just like sticky notes, but comments will remain attached to your highlight, even if you resize your browser or view the page with a different screen resolution.
• Multicolored sticky notes – You asked for it, and we delivered.  You can now choose from four sticky note colors, just like our highlighter tool.
• Automatic page caching – We all know how frustrating it can be to come back to a web page you’ve annotated earlier, only to find that it has either changed or disappeared completely.  Now, premium WebNotes accounts will automatically save a copy of all web pages you bookmark or annotate so that this never happens again!  Just click the yellow star drop-down on the WebNotes toolbar and select “View Cached Page”.

Have suggestions on other features what would make WebNotes even better?  Let us know!

Anyways, here are the results!

First, a graph of the number of users and their methods for creating news scans:

What’s interesting to me is that 32% of the respondents were either unable to afford or completely dissatisfied by Paid Media Monitoring, yet still wanted to do their news scans internally. This is a hugely undeserved market and WebNotes strives to help these folks!

Next, and equally as interesting, the breakdown of company size:

Now before you get confused, a “small” company is defined by Linked in as fewer than 200 employees.  There are a huge number of firms that have under 200 employees, so that would explain why 38% of respondents were in small firms.

Are you a small shop still doing your news scans by hand? Perhaps you should try a free 2 week trial of WebNotes…its available at www.webnotes.net/pr.

But I want to know how you do your scans! I’ve put together a small Social Survey to try to figure it out, so please let me know! I’ll post results here when I get them

http://socialtoo.com/survey/view/3682

Here’s how you can start using media monitoring to actively start working for you:

1) For twitter: If you just want to do a general search click here (or use WebNotes Media Monitoring to set this up for you), otherwise if you are looking to do a refined local search, click here.  If you are a CPA you might have a search that looks like this.

2) For Google News head on over to either news.google.com (or WebNotes Media Monitoring ) or for advanced options click here.  Once again this will allow you to search locally for different news stories. To keep with my prior example of the CPA, here’s what a search might look like.

3) Each of these sources allows you to generate an RSS feed which you can import into WebNotes, or just run independently.

4) Now block off half an hour each day to go through your feeds- respond to tweets that are in your realm of expertise and make sure to highlight articles  that are relevant to your industry.

5) Profit! (If only it were that easy).

How It Works

We give you $10 for each referral who purchases a WebNotes Academic account.*

The people you refer will also get a 60% discount, if they choose a yearly subscription.**

Getting Credit

To get credit for a referral, make sure new users enter the email address associated with your WebNotes account when signing up for WebNotes Academic.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us at referrals@webnotes.net.

*WebNotes Academic subscriptions must last at least 30 days in order to receive $10 referral fee. The 30 days does not include time during free trial or while using free promo codes.
**60% discount on yearly subscriptions cannot be combined with other promotions or discounts.

Enjoy!

1. Start by logging into your account and going here. This will take you to our Media Monitoring set up page.

2. Next, enter keywords related to your clients, your competition and industry keywords.  We will pull from any of 8 sources that you specify including Google News, Google Blogs, Twitter, Social Mention, etc.

3. If you already use an RSS reader like Google Reader, you can bulk import your RSS feeds into WebNotes by using an OPML file. You will have to export this file from your preferred reader.

4.  Add a single RSS feed if you only have a few sources that you want to track.

In those 3 steps you should be able to monitor millions of websites, preventing you from missing valuable coverage. Happy hunting!

Typically creating these daily scans is an enormously time consuming process, involving copying and pasting from a wide variety of sources like Google Alerts, blogs or traditional media monitoring services like Meltwater or Factiva.

Typically, since more than one source is required as only one of these sources will often miss valuable content, it necessitates a huge amount of time to comb through all available repositories. Further, creating a professional report from this content takes time to format with your firms look and feel. Because the human component is so important in this process, it seems it can never be fully automated. but this doesn’t mean that software can’t help! Enter WebNotes PR:

Supplement or Replace your Current Media Monitoring Process

Track your client coverage using WebNotes built-in media monitoring or just find content using your traditional search methods. To use WebNotes monitoring, input custom keywords for your clients and WebNotes will create live feeds from Google News, Google Blogs, Twitter and Technorati. Add your own RSS feeds as well to track industry blogs or other news sources.

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Capture and Organize

Once you’ve found relevant content, simply highlight the important text on the page. WebNotes allows you to keep all of your content organized by client and by subcategory. Easily track coverage, competitive intelligence or industry trends. Use sticky notes to add additional strategic analysis and your unique spin on the competitive landscape.

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Generate Coverage Reports

When your research is complete for the day, simply click “report” and WebNotes will automatically compile a scan for you, formatted and branded to match your firm’s look and feel. The report is completely customizable, so move or even remove content as you see fit. When your report looks perfect, simply email it out, or export it as a PDF or HTML document.

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We are offering a free 2 week trial, so go and register here. We also offer free webinars, so if you’d like to see a live demonstration, email me at aking@webnotes.net!

Public Relations and Communications Professionals face a “monitoring” problem every day. How do you find valuable content that is relevant to your firm or client without wasting hours each day? Especially if you need results from social media as well as traditional media outlets, and especially if you don’t want to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for paid monitoring solutions.  After speaking with dozens of firms, here’s the free tools that people are using:

1. Google Alerts: This ubiqutous tool is hardly new or novel, but it’s a staple in any self respecting professionals toolbelt. Establish up to 1000 different alerts using search terms and Google will email you any time they find a mention of your keywords.  This should be considered a bare minimum for those of you establishing a monitoring presence.
2. Yahoo Alerts: Pretty much the same thing as Google Alerts, but just a different source. The two will often find the same results, but sometimes one will pick up a mention that the other one doesn’t catch. Not a necessary tool, but it certainly can’t hurt!
3. Social Mention: This company bills themselves as Google Alerts for social media.  They also provide very interesting stats as far as comment sentiment, keywords, sources, etc. Definitely check them out, it will change the way you think about reporting to your clients.
4. Zuula Search:  Zuula is a search engine aggregator. Type in any search term and Zuula will search 9 different providers, including blog searches and various news searches.
5. Twitter: This is an absolute must for anyone interested in “real time search”.  Instantly see what people are saying about you right now and how they look at your company or clients.
6. Addictomatic: Another aggregator, but with results presented in a very visually appealing way.  Addictomatic is a good way to get a quick overall picture of the brands you are interested in.
7. Google News:  Some of the best up to date news searches out there. You can get these results in the aggregators I’ve talked about, but if you only care about using a few different sources, definitely add G News to your arsenal.
8. Google Blog Search: Should be fairly explanatory, but Google filters through the blogosphere to find your search terms. A good basic tool to have.
9. Technorati: the original blog search, which currently has indexed tens of millions of different blogs.  These results are also available in the aggregators I’ve talked about.

Are there other monitoring tools out there? What did I miss? In future installments, I’d like to talk about how communications firms keep track of all of these searches. Email aking [at] webnotes.net if you have a unique way of doing this!

[image courtesy of chrisjohnbeckett]