I’m a strong supporter of BackType and the work of Christopher Golda since the debut of the highly valuable comments search engine last September.

Listening effectively requires extensive and active monitoring of not only blog posts and Tweets on Twitter, but also blog comments and other active networks that define the Conversation Prism. It’s how identify active communities that necessitate not only responses, but ongoing participation.

BackType brings blog post comments into the spotlight. Whether you’re managing an online reputation management (ORM) or an online monitoring system (OMS), BackType allows you to search keywords across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, or at the very least, provide you with insight into critical community perspective. You can also search all comments by a particular person and date range to create a snapshot of someone’s area of focus, bias, or expertise.

Golda reached out to let me know that the company introduced two new services that will assist in the listening and monitoring workflow by connecting you to the conversation graph that ultimately connects and powers the Conversation Prism.

BackType Connect reveals all of the conversations that link to a particular post or article. Up until now, many of us have relied up BlogPulse Conversation to track all posts related to a host link – which is still highly effective. Now with BackType Connect, you can unearth related Tweets and highly relevant comments from blogs, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and other networks.

It’s not just about the visualization of comments related to links, BackType Connect “connects” you to the distributed coversations across the Social Media landscape directly in the communities were people are interacting around the content.

Did you know that over one million links are tweeted per day? The problem to date has been that many use URL shorteners to save room for precious characters in Twitter. Unfortunately, when we use intermediary linking bridges, we disrupt the conversation graph by breaking the direct connection between a shared public link and the host link. Instead, we inject a new step by linking to a third party site that then redirects the viewer back to the original source. Most tools are unable to track this path, so the originator of the shared content loses the ability, and corresponding authority, to track affiliated conversations.

To solve this problem, the BackType team released BackTweets, a new service that lets you search for links on Twitter.

You can search keywords to match any URL in which they’re used or complete source URLs to track links to articles, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, etc. It surfaces pertinent tweets that search.twitter.com can’t find.

For example, here’s a BackTweet search for the original URL for my post on mapping relationships on Twitter and social networks, “The Ties that Bind Us.” Notice how it uncovers all related links that I would normally miss through traditional linkbacks, searches on Twitter for my name or username, and most importantly, traverses the tricky waters of URL shortneners from Bit.ly to is.gd to TinyURL.

Brands, publishers, BackType reveals how people are interacting and engaging with your company and/or content.

BackType Connect and BackTweets should find permanent residence in your toolbox of solutions for listening to related conversations and online reputation management (ORM).

Please let me know how BackType helps you…

Related Posts on PR 2.0:

– Tracking Brands on Twitter to Improve How You Listen and Engage
– Comcast Cares and Why Your Business Should too
– Facebook Swims Its Way into Your Lifestream: What the Facebook news means to you
– Top Trends and Apps: How Do People Use Twitter?
– The Ties that Bind Us – Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks
– Make Tweet Love – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships
– The Battle for Your Social Status
– How Dell Deals with Twitter
– Need a Dictionary for Twitter?
– Introducing MicroPR, A Resource for Journalists, Analysts, & Bloggers on Twitter
– Twitter Tools for Communication and Community Professionals
– Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform
– Is FriendFeed the Next Conversation Platform