OK, so I am guilty of occasionally spending too much time in a day keeping up with the various industry and personal blogs that I read; updating various social networking sites and of course Twittering.
“There has to be an easier way to manage this”, I thought; otherwise this could easily consume my entire life. A balance needs to be struck between not maintaining your social network and it ruining your life.
Possibly the easiest way of doing this for me is to use RSS feeds (if you are unfamiliar with RSS then take a look here for a good introduction). Using various RSS feeds it’s possible to bring in all the various social networking sources into one place so that you can monitor them, keep up to date and make judgement calls as to which items need further attention.
Google Reader is superb RSS aggregator made just for this task; always there online, easily configurable, useable offline and whilst on the move! Google Reader also lets you publish your aggregated feeds back out into the community.
Within Google Reader I have now brought in RSS feeds from:
- My LinkedIn profile, showing me my network updates.
- My Facebook Friends status, showing me what everyone’s up to.
- My personal Twitter Feed, echoed what I have posted.
- My Twitter Feed showing all the tweets that I have received.
- Various other Twitter feeds, for various keywords (XMPie etc.) so I can keep a track of the Twitter-Buzz for various things.
- Various industry blogs and news feeds.
Connecting to LinkedIn:
- On LinkedIn; connect to your account
- Under your Home page, you should see a RSS Logo.
- Click on there and configure your RSS feed before added it to Google Reader
Connecting to FaceBook:
- Login to your FaceBook account
- Select Friends from the tabs at the top
- Select to view your friends Status Updates
- On the left you should see an option to subscribe to the feed
Connecting to Twitter:
- Login to your Twitter account
- Select the RSS Feed on your home page and subscribe to that
- I had some initial trouble with this and had to use Feedburner to subscribe to the feed and then used Google Reader to use the feed from Feedburner.
Using Google Blog Search to track blogosphere:
Google Blog Search allows you to create customer searches and then create a RSS feed from the results. Great! For an example check out here.
Using Twitter Search to track the tweet buzz:
The Twitter search API is also very useful. Allowing you to create custom Twitter search (some quite complex) and publish the results as RSS feeds. For an example look here. Obviously you can create as many of these as you wish – some to track your own company’s buzz in tweetland – and some to track your competitors!
Using Google Video to track video entries:
Now that Google Video also searches YouTube videos this is a great way to search both Google Video and YouTube for those video entries that you might want to track. For example take a look at this search and notice the RSS option at the right of the screen. Again many different searches can be created and subscribed to with Google Reader.
So from one source I can now survey the social-scene quickly and effectively keeping a breast of everything that is happening. And if I need to; I can quick jump to the original source, send a reply or post a comment and then “job done”. So, within 2 hours maximum I can keep up to date and on top of what’s happening. Great!
Very nice! Now I wish there was a way to group and filter by keyword… for all of the items.I’ve been considering ways to do this.
You can group RSS feeds with Google Groups; which is very handy. The downside is that you have to manage RSS feeds into specific group, and you cannot do it by filtering.