A listening dashboard lets you keep track of conversations, new content and mentions of an issue or your project right across the web.

Complexity: 2/5

Conversations take place in many different places on the social web. And there is a lot of content published every day that could be useful in your engagement with young people. A listening dashboard is a way of keeping track of it all.

With a listening dashboard, instead of checking out lots of different websites every day to get the latest news, or keep up-to-date with the responses your online engagement has generated, all the content comes to you.

A good listening dashboard will be a tool you use for a few minutes a day - where the investment of time in setting it up soon brings dividend by making your work smarter and more efficient.

In most cases you will want to sign-up to a free listening dashboard service, and customise your own dashboard to meet your needs - but to get an idea of how listening dashboards work and to see an 'instant dashboard' which looks up information from a wide range of sources on a given key-word, you can take a look at this Addictomatic Dashboard on 'Youth Participation'

Three of the most popular fully featured tools are NetVibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle.

If you don't have time to explore the different options, we recommend: NetVibes.

You need to create an account so that your dashboard will remember your preferences, and so that you can log-in and access your dashboard from any internet connected computer. Look for a sign-up link to create your account - the follow the instructions to get a default dashboard set-up.

• One Page Guide to using NetVibes
• The EduBlogger on setting up iGoogle

Once you have your dashboard set-up, you now need to find all the different information sources which can feed it. There are two main ways to add information.

Getting Started Guide

One Page Guide to NetVibes

For example:

• Social Networks - Look for tools that let you keep track of the latest activity on your Bebo, MySpace, Facebook or Twitter account;
• News - Set up a news search for headlines on topics that interest you; consider setting the search to cover your local area;
• Photos - A photo widget will show you the most recently uploaded photos on photosharing websites with a given tag or keyword. It can be great to keep track of an event - or just for inspiration;
• Webmail - See what is waiting in your inbox right from your dashboard;
• Documents - See updates to documents you are working on using a document collaboration tool.

Look for the 'Add Gadgets', 'Add Widgets' or 'Add (RSS) Feeds' and search for the options above.

Many websites and online tools provide RSS feeds which you can bring into your dashboard. For example

• Search Alerts - for tracking any new mentions of a key word, local area, topic or other search term picked up by a search engine.
• Blogs - for keeping track of new headlines on blogs that you follow, or for tracking replies and conversation on a particular blog post.
• Forums - many forums will offer RSS so you can see when there have been replies to a topic you are interested in.
• Twitter Search - for keeping track of mentions of an issue on Twiter.
• Social Bookmarks - from sites like delicious for keeping track of links from people in your network, or on topics you are interested in.

Look for links to help pages in your chosen listening dashboard to find details of how to add RSS feeds (there are also details in the guides listed under 'Resources' above).

You might find it useful to set your dashboard as your home-page, or to add it to your favourites so that you can check it daily.

Dip-in and skim through recent updates daily, and identify new information you need to be aware of - or things that you need to follow up.

Your dashboard will probably take some fine-tuning to get it working exactly as you want. Take the time to regularly add new elements, and weed out ones you no longer need.

Whenever you join a new discussion online, find a new blog, or start working on a new issue - look for RSS feeds that you could add to your dashboard.

There isn't much point in listening unless you are ready to respond to what you here.

Make sure you are able to join in online discussions where neccessary - and find out how you can make sure views you hear via your listening dashboard are fed to the right decision makers in your organisation.

When you think about responding - make sure you can offer constructive input. This flowchart from the US Air Force Public Affairs Agency offers a useful template for thinking about how to respond to comments you find about your work or organisation online.

* You can create a public NetVibes dashboard - like this one from DIUS - making for an instant website, or a tool to share internally with your team.

• Check out more on Listening from the Social by Social guide.

• Beth Kanter has created a Social Media Listening Wiki

• Michelle Martin has put together learning resources on setting up a Listening Dashboard