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.

I came across one of the classic deadly myths of sales. It was in the form of a question on LinkedIn Answers. Let’s see if you can spot it:

What do you find works the best for developing leads? I am currently researching other ways to develop leads and eventually fill up my sales pipeline. I currently use the following: Jigsaw, LinkedIn, NetProspex

If you said, “names and numbers don’t equal leads or viable sales pipeline.” I would agree with you.

All passionate and energetic sales people fight this tendency. And with the glut of data available openly on the Web it can be a very hard battle to win.

We know in our gut that much of hitting our monthly goal has to do with large numbers. So, we are constantly hunting and gathering names and squirreling them away in our contact database or CRM. But, at some point you have to determine, enough is enough. It’s time to stop collecting and start processing.

The only way to avoid the idle list gathering trap is to understand that generating sales leads is much more than just collecting names.

The danger with simply seeking lots of venues to supply you with unsuspecting victims leads is that you forget the objective. A sales pipeline is not a list of names and numbers. It is a queue of leads–people and organizations that have potential need for your products and services. Determining who those folks are takes some effort, a lead generation process.

My guess is that most of you don’t need more names and numbers—especially unqualified ones. Most of your lists are already sufficient. In addition, your sales organization is probably filled with prospects, many of which have inquired or were already qualified in some manner. 

Now dig into those names and learn who they are and why they might need your help.

Then figure out how to turn them into leads. This simple process gets you ready to take that list and turn it into an engagement plan–social media, conferences, trade shows, webinars, email, phone–this is lead generation.

The real beauty of processing those lists is that this effort will continue dumping new leads into your pipeline.

Image by Tiago Daniel via Flickr

I can’t think of too many people I would less like to be around than the “idea guy” or the “I thought of that guy.” And two of my favorite blogs have called them out.

I have nothing to add. I’ll just point you to them:

37Signals: There’s no room for the Idea Guy

Startups need people able and willing of doing the actual work. They need programmers, designers, and eventually folks to do marketing, support, and more. What they don’t need, though, is someone who’s just going to be The Idea Guy.

Chris Brogan: I could Totally Do That 

Someone else took your idea. You’ve been talking about it for years. That’s your thing. I can’t believe she said what I’ve been saying for years, and now she’s got a book. I could totally do that.

So, what are you going to do today?

I just finished up the latest book in the Jason Bourne series, Bourne Deception. I love the action and intrigue of a good spy thriller. It pulls me back to my early days in the intelligence community…

Okay, maybe not quite the same–I never had to kill quite so many people to accomplish my objectives. However, it did get my creative thoughts going on how similar our “tradecraft” was to savvy social networking and marketing.

That’s right I spent quite a few years in the Air Force and later in a boutique consulting firm in Washington DC practicing the fine art of Information Warfare. This experience taught me a lot about motivating people to help you meet your own objectives.

I have a few quick thoughts that may be useful in applying these methodologies to your social media marketing strategy.

1. Objective(s)

No intelligence operation or marketing campaign goes well without a clear objective in mind. Intelligence work is a messy interaction of people, motivations, and emotions. The game plan often takes a hard right or left after the first few moves—so having a clear final objective is critical for getting back on course.

Marketing is no different. Are you trying to create an audience? Create a perception? Generate loyalty? Generate leads (customer inquiries)? Get access to a decision maker? It might be one or more.

Define it before you make any moves.

2. Profile

To achieve that objective (especially with social media) you need the help of one or more people. But, what kind of people?

It is relatively simple to attract an audience of thousands on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. However, the likelihood of these arbitrary followers returning real results (revenue) on your marketing investment is slim.

This is where a well thought out profile makes you money. Think about: who will promote you, who will connect you, who will buy from you? These are the people you want to attract.

A profile will accomplish a couple of keys objectives:

• Helps you find and identify them easier
• Helps you understand what motivates them
• Helps you find their communities
• Helps you discover past campaigns that worked

Profiles are great for designing influence strategies and campaign maps. Yes, just like spook work!

3. Searches

Now it is time to find these people and communities that may contain dense pools of candidates. There are a variety of ways to identify a large “pool” of prospects for fanatical customer agents.

Nearly every major social network or community has a sophisticated search engine and of course Google is the power tool of Black Ops marketers looking for recruits!

Here are a few places where I monitor for opportunities:

• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• LinkedIn
• Google (Alerts, Reader, Blog Search, Buzz)

4. Candidates

Searches are going to fill you full of opportunity, but the numbers will be unmanageable. You need to quickly get down to a reasonable number of targets. However, be careful not to exclude outliers returned in your searches.

One very effective approach will be to segment your candidates (prospects). These various groups can be used for a variety of purposes, from testing to alternative campaigns. Most importantly segmentation allows you to manage more opportunity and yield higher returns.

Some example segmentations and opportunities:

• High followers count, but low activity: May indicate other reputation or communities within which this person may be a strong leader or influencer. This person may be a strong candidate for your marketing, just in another venue
• High activity, quality content, but low count of followers: May be an aggressive newcomer with potential. In addition, these candidates may have a high motivation to network, refer, and evangelize new products, services, or people.
• High follower count, high activity, responsive community, but little relevance: These can be challenging, yet lucrative if done smartly. Candidates like these are excellent for new market penetration. Think: Is there a way to tie into this market and this person’s community in a natural and valuable way?

5. Monitoring

You have you pool of candidates, your recruiting targets, you potential “agents.” It is time to start laying the groundwork for recruitment…

Marketing and sales like to call this customer relationship management (CRM). I am here to tell you, that thinking dooms many a marketing campaign. People are not interested in having relationships with brands.

Here is what they are interested in:

• Personal Ego
• Reciprocity
• Consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

Surprise, this is not a secret list if you are a student of Robert Cialdini. These are the basic tenets of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” This is what makes it easy to influence others to do our bidding—in a good way.

This is what you are monitoring for. Look for examples and opportunities to understand what influences your prospective audience.

6. Vetting

This is probably one of the most critical parts of segmenting good opportunities from the average crowd. Who is willing to help others and who simply has blinders for their own self-interests?

This can be a relatively difficult task requiring hours of monitoring. However, there are a few simple shortcuts.

Here are some great ways to search for relevance and popularity on various social networks:

FriendFeed Search: Filtering for Popularity and Relevance (Web Worker Daily)
Take Advantage of Twitter Search Operators (Web Worker Daily)
Get More Out of Your Google Blog Search (Web Worker Daily)

Save these searches as RSS feeds and you have a running database of agents. Even more impressive is that these people are relevant to your marketing objectives, have a sizeable and active following, and are willing to promote products and services similar to yours.

7. Recruitment

Now you are into the scary part—recruitment. You need to convince your agent(s) to promote your products or services.

If you have done the preceding steps this may be quite simple.

You know a lot about your candidates. You know who is influential and who isn’t. You know who is willing to promote others and who isn’t. You probably even have an example or two of how to successfully pitch these candidates. In fact, they may have even told you in some social post.

Of course, if you don’t ask you won’t know. In this social networking world I suggest that during the vetting process you are actually engaging with candidates, helping them out, and gaining some level of reciprocity.

8. Training

You hooked them of course. Now the rubber meets the road. Don’t assume they know how to help you. The Web world can be a complex place. Just because someone knows how to blog or Twitter doesn’t mean they know the best way to give a good back link, to ReTweet you, or cut ‘n paste your affiliate code.

Talk about what works best, considering your marketing agent’s skills and style. Try to make promoting your product or service as simple and natural as possible for that person.

9. Motivation

Getting a new agent to Digg a post, ReTweet something, link to you, or even reference you in a blog post can be relatively easy. The hard part is motivating them to do it again and again. Even better, doing it without you even asking the favor.

The secret is in your motivation strategy.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s all about getting paid, right? The facts will amaze you.

I will go back to my intelligence training here. Did you know that even the most notorious and famous spies in history have made more than $100,000? Not per year. For the entire time they were spying (most for years). Many spies are barely paid enough to cover their expenses. Most are paid nothing.

So, it must be ideology? No. Few Americans that spied for the Soviet Union had any great love for Communism or great hate for America. Motivation is elusive and often tied to some emotional (often illogical) need. Find it, tap it.

Study your agents. Find out what prompts them to do things. Find where that emotional gap is. Help them fill the gap.

10. Activation

Your agents are trained and motivated—it’s time to activate them. Give them something to do. I see a lot of people in social networks that have accumulated hundreds and even thousands of followers, but do nothing with them.

Believe it or not this is not only a waste of value, but also demotivating for the network. People like to feel a part of something, which means doing something, visible and useful. Build your marketing strategy to hit that button.

Case Management

None of these steps will do you any good if you don’t have a good strategy for case management. Any good intel operation needs good case management. Good operations (marketing campaigns) produce their best results when they are sustained over time.

Continue to repeat this operational process. Revisiting your pool of candidates and agents will help you to continue building your network of agents and strengthening the ones that are already active.

Do you have any of your own black ops social media marketing techniques? I’d love to hear about them.

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• Competitive Intelligence 2.0 (bettercloser.com)
• Mapping Influence in Social Media (kaleidico.com)
• What is Social Media Monitoring? 5 Steps to Listening Efficiently. (bettercloser.com)

Image by kvanhorn via Flickr

Monitoring your brand online and in social media has become a no brainer. However, if you are neglecting your niche keywords and competitor brands you are letting opportunity fall out of your sales funnel.

Here are a few examples of a great Michigan brand, Steelcase monitoring social media for sales:

A big name Venture Capitalist and top Twitter influencer mentions his new “treadputer” being installed:

Nicely accompanied by a photo (note the number of views):

This smelled like opportunity for @Steelcase_Store:

Of course, I’m not quite sure why Steelcase’s review center isn’t a Flickr feed, or at least encouraging Flickr postings. Flickr has a lot more traffic than http://store.steelcase.com/go/ideas/. And much of what is already there is very inspiring to a prospective buyer:

However, the neatest part about good social media sales is getting the natural customer or partner driven sales—like these:

(the power of influencer outreach)

(the power of social media enabled partners)

And, don’t forget the opportunities competitors (lack of social media presence) gives you. Here is a priceless swipe from Herman Miller

@Steelcase_Store engages, but @HermanMiller (they look singularly focused on customer service) doesn’t…

Who do you think will get the sale?

This is a great case study on engaging prospects and seizing opportunities. My only recommendation would be to start extending this effort into a broader monitoring and engagement campaigns. I think a whole social media plan could be laid around new and traditional media coverage like Lifehacker.com’s obsession with standing desks and Treadputers and New York Time’s Stand Up While You Read This! Maybe even capture the Treadputer obsession on Facebook—that’s right “The page you requested was not found”—opportunity!

Social media monitoring should be a top priority on any corporate strategic agenda. This medium of communicating and marketing is surging at an unprecedented rate. What’s more it can be overwhelming if you simply jump in without any filters.

This begs the frustrating question most corporate executive are pondering: What is social media monitoring and why do I need it?

1. Social Networking Platforms - The best place to start understanding how to listen into social media is to understand where all the conversations are coming from. Social networking platforms are simple web-based software tools that fundamentally do two very important things: connect related people and facilitate their communication.

This is the starting point of monitoring social media. You need to identify where your community or customers hang-out. Then you need to put your ear to those places.

2. Social Media Aggregation - Fortunately, for those in the listening business RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has already built the pipes to flow these conversations into a central location or dashboard. RSS a technology built originally to help syndicate blog content is now a default protocol for moving nearing any kind of content from place to place.

In monitoring social networks, RSS is the preferred way to aggregate these channels into software that can sort, analyze, and report.

3. Conversation Sorting - One of the biggest challenges in the social media environment is sorting the signal from the noise. This makes keyword monitoring and sorting a critical element to any social media listening strategy. Keywords are not only your trigger mechanism to identify interesting conversation, but it is also the sorting mechanism to make sense of them.

Using keywords and keyword clusters can make your monitoring much more productive.

4. Keyword Monitoring - Keywords are important elements to identify trigger events and sorting out value. Unfortunately, this is the language of search engines, but not aggregation strategies like RSS. Therefore, you need to do a little work to get this working. Simply aggregating a bunch of sites only amplifies the noise in your monitoring strategy.

The key to monitoring effectively and efficiently is aggregating only the streams and conversations triggered by your keywords.

5. Social Engagement and Reporting - All of this social networking and monitoring is for not if you can’t do something with it. That means engaging in or reporting on social media channels when opportunity or crises arises. Social media monitoring is not a strictly passive pursuit. Getting positive return out of your investment in monitoring comes with efficiently organizing your engagement strategy.

I’m continually amazed at how many B2B sales folks are not yet making social media a serious part of their sales process. Half of those people are apprehensive about trying something new and the other half believe it will be a big waste of time.

My hope is that following these 10 simple principles will get you over both of these hurdles. I can assure you that you will need to incorporate social media and networking into your sales process to stay competitive. Why not start now?

Are you already using social media in your B2B sales process? Leave a comment on what is and isn’t working for you?

I’m looking for specific frustrations in using social media in your sales process to address in future blog posts…can you help me, help you?

Competitive intelligence 2.0 is just the latest benefactor of Web 2.0 technology. As with other genres tagging on the 2.0 moniker competitive intelligence is getting a face-lift because of this open and interoperable tech philosophy. Your opportunity is to take advantage of the advantage before your competitor does.

Competitive Intelligence is Business

There is really few things more fundamental to business than competition. That means that watching your competitor needs to be a core competency. Why then do so many folks neglect this critical skill?

That is an opportunity.

Competitive intelligence and social media monitoring is becoming a notable advantage in an increasingly online business environment. Surprisingly few are doing it yet, but there are thousands of important observations and opportunities flying around in these social streams and conversations.

Spying on Competitors is Hard

Getting relevant insight into your competitors strategy used to be very difficult, especially if you wanted to keep it legal. Most of the strategy took place in board rooms, behind closed doors, and were documented in physically routed memorandums.

Simply trying to get glimpses of these closed sessions meant a lot of money and creating direct relationships with tight-lipped insiders. That is changing. Web 2.0 is shifting more than business, it is shifting how we develop strategy.

It is also shifting how we collect this critical intelligence. What used to take hours in the library, hundreds of dollars worth of periodical subscriptions, expensive media clipping services, and big expense accounts in being reduced to bits and bytes online.

Social Media Makes Competitive Intelligence Easier

One of those major shifts is a migration to social networks as advisors and social media as workspaces. That means that those little bits of strategy that used to be tucked away safely in private memos are now flying around on the Web. That means you challenge is simply to grab them, aggregate them, analyze them, report on them, and use them to your competitive advantage.

Social media has changes how we do competitive intelligence.

Like most technology innovations, social media has dramatically improved the capability and the efficiency of competitive intelligence. What used to take a library full of resources, complicated intelligence trade craft, and clever analyst has now been reduced mostly to software.

Competitive Intelligence 2.0 is best defined as social media monitoring. Web 2.0 is making this critical component of business strategy simpler than ever. Are your getting your competitive advantage?

Image by wmrice via Flickr

Most of us spend every day doing things that we think are really important.

We go to meetings, we try to hit our sales numbers, we analyze our reports, we try to make it home in time to have dinner with the family. However, occasionally you get to actually do something that is really important.

My wife is doing that right now and I’m really proud of her!

She left yesterday headed to Cambodia on a mission trip. She will be spending ten days supporting the Rapha House, an organization that helps to rescue and heal children out of slavery and sexual exploitation.

This is a knee-weakening and stomach-knotting cause when you realize the staggering numbers associated with these egregious crimes against children: The UN conservative estimates that there are nearly 2.5 million trafficked victims at any given time and according to a recent International Labour Organization human trafficking for sexual and economic exploitation is the most lucrative and fastest growing transnational crime (ahead of drug trafficking) estimated at $32 billion annually.

I’m proud of my wife for getting involved in something really important! If you’d like to follow her work or leave her a note of encouragement—stop by http://HeatherOnMission.com.

Thanks for letting me share a little of my non-sales passion.

Social media and social networking has spent its first few years as a tool of fun. We connect with friends, we talk about jaunts to the coffee shop, and we do a little verbal jousting. But, now people are getting serious. Fortune 500 companies are seeing opportunity and jumping in and making big splashes. This alone should tell you there is massive opportunity in figuring this stuff out.

Social Media is Fun

Hands down, there are few technologies that have been as fun as social networking…probably since email emerged. That’s no coincidence. We are social creatures. We like to communicate. Chatting and exchanging thoughts and ideas is fun.

The neat thing about social media venues like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube is that we can quickly draw together our community of friends, family, colleagues, and even find new people that share our interests.

Having a community online is not much different than having a great neighborhood. You share, take care of one another, and occasionally get together for a great block party. Social media makes this kind of close connectivity a reality even in an online world.

Social Engagement is Fun

Like I said communicating is a natural need, which makes it fun. However, we are all human. That means we usually have a core selfish motivation–what’s in it for me? That is what begins to excite those looking to social media to make money.

All of those people chatting create valuable threads, trends, perceptions, and attitudes. Marketers, corporate strategists, public relations specialists, and other profiteers want that information.

But, the signal to noise ratio is very poor in most of these channels. The idle chatter makes shifting out value difficult. What’s worse, often the least valuable information has the most volume and frequency–social media spam.

Social Media Monitoring is Profitable

This is why social media monitoring is so valuable. You need to listen. You need to be tuned into this media. However, you must do it with precision that makes you efficient and consistent.

Social media monitoring allows you to listen into multiple channels and aggregate conversations from a variety of social networks. Delivering all of these conversations into one place is half of monitoring social media successfully. The rest of that battle is sorting out the noise. Keywords and RSS are the essential elements to completing monitoring success.

These components allow us to tune into the right phrases that identify the conversations we want to monitor and RSS brings them to our dashboard.

This is what will make your social media strategy profitable.