FriendFeed is an excellent way to use your “friends” content aggregators as filters for your own social media monitoring. FriendFeed is a web-based a personal aggregator of all of your online content. You can have nearly any social media content or profile you publish to pumped into FriendFeed.
At first, that sort of tool seems of little use. Why would you want to aggregate your own content, after all you produced it. And, chances are you are trying to syndicate it, not aggregate this great stuff.
Actually, the real magic of FriendFeed is when you use all of your friends aggregations to filter in great stuff that is far more relevant and broad than a general search on Google or watching your Twitter feed. This filtration system can also be used competitively.
Here are some tips to tune this great tool on filtering out content about competitors.
1. Search for Keywords - Begin your competitive intelligence project by doing some keyword searches relevant to your competitive landscape–competitor names, products, and services.
2. Save Searches - Once you have found the right combinations of keywords that are revealing valuable information, FriendFeed allows you to save these searches for ongoing monitoring and analysis.
3. Subscribe to Key People - Also embedded in these search streams are key people. These people are likely to be competitors’ employees, executives, analyst, or influential players in your competitive landscape. These people, and their content, are certain to be excellent intelligence sources.
4. Create Lists - Once you have a focused set of competitive intelligence sources it is time to categorize them. FriendFeed again works well here by allowing you to create Lists. These lists will aggregate this competitive content–feeding you regular insights into your competitors.
5. Find Important Networks - Once you have important and insightful people you will start to see other patterns. Most important of those patterns are who is connected to whom. These are networks of influencers and business partners. Identifying and monitoring these networks can be very valuable to your competitive intelligence analysis.
FriendFeed is about people sharing content and connecting to those they find valuable. This is one of the most powerful features of social networks and FriendFeed turns these valuable networks of people into steady flows of content and information.
FriendFeed is a great way to efficiently bring in sources of information and intelligence. Tuning this flow to observe those most influential in your industry or those with access to important competitive information can give you the competitive advantage.
About Bill Rice
