Ah yes, the slick new Volvo c30. Nice car indeed, and released today at the Paris Auto Show with availability in early 2007. This is a great question because tracking product and company mentions online is one of the more important tasks that people in marketing, sales and management need to do. It might well be your own product, as with the c30, but it might also be the name of your top competitors and/or their most popular products.

There are three main areas where I believe it's important to track the buzz online: online media, the blogosphere, and discussion forums. You're absolutely right when you suspicion that Google isn't a good way to do this too: The problem with Google is that it just doesn't get information quickly enough. This blog entry, for example, can be found with blog search engines within a few minutes of my posting it, but Google might not include it in its main index for days or even weeks. You can't afford to wait that long.

However, Google News is a splendid tool for monitoring online media and you can find it at news.google.com. Go to the site and type in a basic search phrase like volvo c30 and you'll get a list of the media coverage of the car from a few thousand news sources that Google monitors. More usefully, you can then save the URL of that search result and have a bookmark for the future. It'll look like this:

  http://news.google.com/news?q=volvo+c30

In terms of tracking us bloggers, there's rarely a better place to go than Technorati for this sort of information, and as with Google News, you can also save a Technorati search to make your life easier in the future. Here's a Technorati link that searches for mentions of the c30:

  http://www.technorati.com/search/volvo%20c30?language=en&authority=n

Finally, to keep track of what's being discussed on mailing lists and user forums, I'd suggest you go back to Google again, but this time pay attention to Google Groups. Once more, you can type in a search pattern and save the resultant URL as a shortcut:

  http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=volvo+c30

Finally, most of these have their information available as an RSS feed, which means that you could subscribe to the resultant data and use a single consolidated program or view to see what's new in each of these three areas. You can get more information on that here: How do I subscribe to an RSS Feed?

And for those of you curious about this new car from Volvo? Check it out:

Sexy, eh?

Hope that's all helpful and lets you keep track of what's going on in the online world!