RSS and Google Reader can combine to be one of the few PR monitoring tools you ever need. The Google Reader does a great job of aggregating and organizing all of your RSS monitoring feeds. However, if you really want Google Reader to be a PR tool you need to learn a couple of advanced tricks.
Finding Journalist and Media
The first step to customize your Google Reader for PR is to fill it with feeds from the your important media targets. Most online and offline media outlets have RSS feeds of their content. This will allow you to quickly see the trends and be alerted to new stories in these various media outlets.
Increasingly, we are seeing journalist getting directly involved in social media. This adds an additional source of information to pipe into your Google Reader. These direct social media interactions by journalist (most often on Twitter) can also be subscribed to via RSS.
Tracking the Experts and Influencers
Don’t forget about the other experts that influence your media targets. They are obviously doing something right. Subscribing to their RSS feeds from blogs, Twitter, and other social media venues will bring you ideas and competitive intelligence.
Monitoring these people will also give you opportunities to engage in the community. Ideas and contributions you make by knowing and interacting with these people will be picked up and observed by the same media you are targeting. It might also be the quickest relationship building tool in your arsenal.
Monitoring Searches
If you really want get the most out of Google Reader as a PR and social media monitoring tool you need to add searches. Most of the popular search engines and social media websites allow you to turn your searches into RSS feeds. By doing this simple trick you can be instantly alerted to new results popping onto the Web, blogs, or real-time social networks.
Reporting and Analyzing Trends
Finally, and perhaps the most important role of the Google Reader, is to get the critical information out. You can use some of the rudimentary tools within Google Reader to track trends, topics, and sources you read the most. Then when you do find important PR tips and action items you can simply forward these items by sharing within Google Reader or via email.
You can also directly engage in many of the social media channels by using the sharing tools under each item. This will help get your social media engagement strategy underway.
Google Reader is one of the best starter tools for social media monitoring. It is simple to subscribe, read, and forward online content. This makes it an efficient way for PR professionals to do much of their job–looking for opportunities, identifying and connect with media, and monitoring and managing crises.
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