Make Your Own Social Media Listening Post

Thanks to Open Source (free) widgets you can create your own division of the NSA to monitor social media conversations about your products and competition. Using free code from TweetGrid.com we did just that for a new section on our Eyechat Blog. Dubbed EyeSpy, the four columns on the page each search the Twittersphere for terms relevant to optometrists and display Tweets that match. Though other free applications, such as Tweetdeck and CoTweet, also offer search capabilities, they’re not very portable. A widget can work just about anywhere: you’re website, mobile phone, or intranet.