Shaun Gallagher's Blog: About Shaun's books - Posts Tagged "reddit"
I built these free tools to monitor the web
A few weeks ago, my book "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" was released.
Since the beginning of the year, I've been working with my publicist at Penguin to formulate and execute a publicity plan, and now it's paying off. The book has gotten some nice reviews, and from what I can tell, word-of-mouth sentiment is pretty positive.
In the case of pre-arranged interviews with newspapers, magazines, websites, and other media, I know ahead of time that the book is going to be mentioned.
But in the case of unsolicited reviews on blogs or mentions of the book on social media, I don't always know ahead of time what's going to be published, and unless I actively monitor the web for those things, most are likely to escape my notice.
Thus, I've built a few tools (and leveraged some existing tools) to help me keep on top of things and find opportunities to further market my book. Here's a run-down of what I've built and the other tools I use.
Twitter Monitoring
It's great fun reading the tweets that mention my book.
One way to keep tabs on them is to use Twitter's Advanced Search, but I'm not going to spend my whole day constantly refreshing the search results page.
To automate the process, I used twitter-api-php, a simple PHP wrapper for Twitter API calls, to set up a basic monitoring script that emails me when new tweets are published that mention "Shaun Gallagher" or "Experimenting With Babies."
The script runs every 10 minutes, which is close enough to real-time for my purposes. The source code is available on GitHub. I didn't spend much time on it, or the tools that follow, so don't assume the code is production-ready, but it works for me.
Reddit Monitoring
One way to engage potential readers is to contribute (thoughtful) comments to a (relevant) discussion.
Reddit has a nice search API that I query for search terms relevant to my book, such as "infant research." Perhaps someone is asking a question in r/askscience that pertains to such research.
Using a little PHP script I whipped up, available on GitHub, I can get email alerts about those results and hopefully contribute some useful information to the thread.
Amazon Monitoring
Normally, the first place I go when I want to read reviews about a book is its Amazon product page. The customer reviews typically give me a decent idea about what to expect.
Naturally, I'm interested in the reviews of my own book, so I wrote a script that monitors the book's Customer Reviews page on Amazon and sends me an email notification whenever a new review is posted.
The script, available on GitHub, scrapes the page and uses phpQuery to pull out the relevant data.
Facebook Like Notifications
This isn't really a tool that monitors brand mentions; rather, it's a tool to monitor the popularity of a Facebook post, which is also a useful tool when you're trying to promote your brand. Maybe it's a little bit overkill, but I like to get an email alert when someone likes one of my posts, not just when they comment on it.
I used Facebook's PHP SDK to write a little script, available on GitHub, to monitor new Likes and send me email alerts about them.
The script compiles all of the new Likes your posts have received since the last time it ran, so it's not as if your inbox will be flooded with emails; nevertheless, you can potentially receive an email every since time the script runs, so it's probably best to not let it run more frequently than every five minutes.
Google Alerts
It's simple: You set up an alert by entering a search term, and Google will regularly email you when new results appear for that search term.
I have Google Alerts set up for "Shaun Gallagher" and "Experimenting With Babies," and I quickly find out about mentions of my book that I probably would not have encountered in other ways, particularly if a site doesn't link to my website (which tracks referrers).
I also use Google Alerts to find out about news stories about infant research; I then tweet the most interesting stuff to my Twitter account, @shaun_gallagher.
HARO Labeling
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a service that allows journalists to put out a call for sources who are knowledgeable about a particular topic. By responding to relevant queries, I can get my book mentioned in the press and establish my authority on the subject matter.
I subscribe to HARO's three-a-day email digests, which typically have about 40 queries each. That can be a lot to slog through, so I've set up Gmail labels that are applied to the email if it contains certain words. For instance, I have labels for "baby" and "newborn" and "infant."
It's possible to take this sort of system a step further by pre-processing the emails, to weed out false positives like "baby boomer" and discarding any emails that don't have a positive hit.
Since the beginning of the year, I've been working with my publicist at Penguin to formulate and execute a publicity plan, and now it's paying off. The book has gotten some nice reviews, and from what I can tell, word-of-mouth sentiment is pretty positive.
In the case of pre-arranged interviews with newspapers, magazines, websites, and other media, I know ahead of time that the book is going to be mentioned.
But in the case of unsolicited reviews on blogs or mentions of the book on social media, I don't always know ahead of time what's going to be published, and unless I actively monitor the web for those things, most are likely to escape my notice.
Thus, I've built a few tools (and leveraged some existing tools) to help me keep on top of things and find opportunities to further market my book. Here's a run-down of what I've built and the other tools I use.
Twitter Monitoring
It's great fun reading the tweets that mention my book.
One way to keep tabs on them is to use Twitter's Advanced Search, but I'm not going to spend my whole day constantly refreshing the search results page.
To automate the process, I used twitter-api-php, a simple PHP wrapper for Twitter API calls, to set up a basic monitoring script that emails me when new tweets are published that mention "Shaun Gallagher" or "Experimenting With Babies."
The script runs every 10 minutes, which is close enough to real-time for my purposes. The source code is available on GitHub. I didn't spend much time on it, or the tools that follow, so don't assume the code is production-ready, but it works for me.
Reddit Monitoring
One way to engage potential readers is to contribute (thoughtful) comments to a (relevant) discussion.
Reddit has a nice search API that I query for search terms relevant to my book, such as "infant research." Perhaps someone is asking a question in r/askscience that pertains to such research.
Using a little PHP script I whipped up, available on GitHub, I can get email alerts about those results and hopefully contribute some useful information to the thread.
Amazon Monitoring
Normally, the first place I go when I want to read reviews about a book is its Amazon product page. The customer reviews typically give me a decent idea about what to expect.
Naturally, I'm interested in the reviews of my own book, so I wrote a script that monitors the book's Customer Reviews page on Amazon and sends me an email notification whenever a new review is posted.
The script, available on GitHub, scrapes the page and uses phpQuery to pull out the relevant data.
Facebook Like Notifications
This isn't really a tool that monitors brand mentions; rather, it's a tool to monitor the popularity of a Facebook post, which is also a useful tool when you're trying to promote your brand. Maybe it's a little bit overkill, but I like to get an email alert when someone likes one of my posts, not just when they comment on it.
I used Facebook's PHP SDK to write a little script, available on GitHub, to monitor new Likes and send me email alerts about them.
The script compiles all of the new Likes your posts have received since the last time it ran, so it's not as if your inbox will be flooded with emails; nevertheless, you can potentially receive an email every since time the script runs, so it's probably best to not let it run more frequently than every five minutes.
Google Alerts
It's simple: You set up an alert by entering a search term, and Google will regularly email you when new results appear for that search term.
I have Google Alerts set up for "Shaun Gallagher" and "Experimenting With Babies," and I quickly find out about mentions of my book that I probably would not have encountered in other ways, particularly if a site doesn't link to my website (which tracks referrers).
I also use Google Alerts to find out about news stories about infant research; I then tweet the most interesting stuff to my Twitter account, @shaun_gallagher.
HARO Labeling
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a service that allows journalists to put out a call for sources who are knowledgeable about a particular topic. By responding to relevant queries, I can get my book mentioned in the press and establish my authority on the subject matter.
I subscribe to HARO's three-a-day email digests, which typically have about 40 queries each. That can be a lot to slog through, so I've set up Gmail labels that are applied to the email if it contains certain words. For instance, I have labels for "baby" and "newborn" and "infant."
It's possible to take this sort of system a step further by pre-processing the emails, to weed out false positives like "baby boomer" and discarding any emails that don't have a positive hit.
