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5 Simple Steps to Turn Google Reader into a Social Media Monitoring Tool

April 6, 2010 By Bill Rice

Social media monitoring is important to every company and brand. The social Web is creating both opportunities and risks to our businesses. Social media is growing in popularity and creating an enormous public relations impact with simple communication tools, like: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and hundreds of others.

These simply mean your job as a PR specialist or corporate strategist is more critical than ever. Social media, given to viral-like behavior, could instantly make your brand a rock star or drag you into a PR crisis firestorm. The key to being in the best position on both is social media monitoring.

1. Start with a RSS Reader - The first step in any good social media monitoring campaign is to find a good intelligence collection tool. I prefer, as a starter tool, Google Reader. This is one of the most popular RSS feed aggregators and makes collecting known social media sources simple.

In most cases adding bits of social media information to your monitoring is as easy as clicking on the websites RSS link, button, or icon. This will then redirect you to a page asking your RSS reader type–select Google.

2. Subscribe to Industry Blogs - Now that you have your free social media monitoring software in place start looking for leading industry or competitor blogs. With the growing popularity of these informal publishing platform, nearly everyone has them.

These blogs are often oozing with leaks, tips, and prognostication. Also, look for clues to other related information sources (blogs) in the blogroll. This is where many bloggers list other websites and blogs they follow.

The neatest part of all is that you can subscribe to these RSS feeds for free and anonymously.

3. Subscribe to Key Searches - Websites and blogs are one thing, but if you want the latest scoop you should subscribe to RSS feeds on searches. I have found the most productive way to do this is by using Google News Search, Google Blog Search, and Twitter Search. Each of these will allow you to do your keywords search, view the results, and then if you like it subscribe via RSS. This will update your Google Reader with the latest results as they come in.

4. Actively Discover and Prune Your Feeds - As you begin subscribing to RSS feed you will quickly discover that without good analytical tools on top of this data it is quickly overwhelming. The best way to combat this without buying a more sophisticated social media monitoring tool is to constantly discover new (and better) sources and pruning the less productive ones.

5. Don’t Forget Reporting - One of the best things about Google Reader is you can quickly alert your team or management about emerging trends. I suggest using primarily the email feature, but you can also share within the Google Reader to push the information out through a social media channel like Twitter or Facebook.

The Google Reader can be a great first step in social media monitoring. Although it is very limited in discovering emerging sources and trends, it can give you the leg up on competitors. It’s other weakness is of course analysis and reporting, but again it can get you started.

The most important thing is to remember that social media is a great source of early warnings, trending opportunities and risks, and will keep you in the know. If your are monitoring social media actively you will rarely be surprised with a PR opportunity or crisis ever again.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence, Featured Tagged With: google reader, monitoring, rss, Social Media

Use Google Reader as Your PR Monitoring Tool

March 9, 2010 By Bill Rice

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.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: google reader, PR, rss, Social Media

Simple Competitive Intelligence Using RSS Feeds

January 7, 2010 By Bill Rice

Competitive intelligence is an increasingly critical skill. The economy has certainly made the business environment more competitive. However, the increasingly open and social Web is an even bigger factor. And the biggest venue is social media.

Companies (your competitors) are leaking more information than ever into social media channels. Snooping on these dropped hints and disclosures can give you a big strategic advantage.

RSS for Competitive Intelligence

One of my favorite ways to efficiently collect competitive intelligence is with RSS feeds. This is one of the most powerful tools a sales person or dedicated competitive intelligence analyst can learn.

Originally, RSS was created to efficiently syndicate content around the Web–literally allowing content to move. However, it can also be used to make intelligence move to you. RSS is a great way to collect information from websites, blogs, and social media streams.

RSS is Anonymous

One of the biggest advantages of RSS for intelligence collections is that it is anonymous. Unlike subscribing to a competitors email newsletter, you can subscribe to RSS without leaving a trace.

What’s more, these anonymous RSS feeds are increasingly available on a variety of source of information. They are automatically created on most corporate blogs, websites, and investor relations sites. However, even more valuable they are available on social networking sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn. They can even be created on custom searches at Google, Twitter, and other popular search engines.

Discover Niches

Now that you know what RSS is and how powerful it can be for competitive analysis, let’s find some good sources of intelligence. Again, social media and the social Web is a big help here. Many industry insiders are increasingly blogging or joining niche social networks. One you find a few of these industry gurus you can tap into the niche.

Some of the best places to look for industry communities, include: Industry expert blogrolls, LinkedIn groups, Ning.com communities, and Twitter Lists. Each of these venues use RSS. So once you find the community–grab the RSS feed.

Aggregate RSS Feeds

The final step in really using RSS feeds for competitive intelligence is to aggregate them into an RSS reader or aggregator. There are a number of free and paid RSS tools on the market, depending on your sophistication. To start with you should find something simple. It should allow you to easily add RSS feeds, group common feeds, and probably email or otherwise report out key findings.

RSS is a powerful technology for anyone competing in business to understand. However, if your primary role is marketing, sales, or corporate strategic find yourself a favorite RSS reader and start listening in on all the “loose lips” on the Web.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, rss, Social Selling

RSS, Competitive Intelligence 2.0 Plumbing

December 3, 2009 By Bill Rice

Just the other day I wrote about a simple framework to discuss how competitive intelligence is evolving. But, I sort of neglected to talk about what is bringing this virtual flood of information–RSS.

It is really sort of amazing. RSS sometimes believed to stand for “Really Simple Syndication,” “Rich Site Summary,” or “RDF Site Summary.” I’m not sure anyone really is certain.

One things is for sure, it’s elegantly simple and mostly obscured from the average user. However, nearly everyone is getting the benefit. You see these simple little XML markups of everyone’s content is being pinged, parsed, and sprayed all over the Internet.

RSS literally makes things move.

The really exciting thing is that people are starting to realize that and using it to make information come to them. On the one hand that makes it much more efficient for you to get your daily dose of news and information. However, for the more clever and ambitious it means you can get the step on your rivals.

Here is a great example of Journalist using RSS for competitive intelligence (hat tip: @davewiner the father of RSS)

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Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, dave winer, google reader, journalist, rss