One of the side effects of the growing use of social media by IT industry analysts and analyst relations (AR) is a pending sense of doom that we are going to get overwhelmed by too… much… stuff. This certainly came out in discussions at the US Forrester AR Council panel I was on and in blog posts like When do we get work done? I certainly have felt that way in the past, but slowly and surely I have picked up techniques that permit me to monitor a fairly large number of social media streams (110+ blogs and 140+ Twitter streams) without spending hours a day doing so. In this post I will share these tips.
Note: These tip and tricks are not necessarily the absolutely best-in-class, merely ones that we have found to-date. Nor are the tools mentioned the results of systematic research and evaluation, merely ones that we have played with and decided to use. As we continue to expand the portfolio of tips and tools, we will make sure to share them with you.
The main tips are to use an RSS reader and to organize your feeds in folders*. This saves you the time of checking individual blogs that might not have any activity. The following example explains the use of Bloglines, but probably most RSS readers will do something similar. First, set up a Bloglines account.
- Go to www.bloglines.com and set up an account by clicking on “Sign up now. It’s free!”
- After registering, click on the Feeds tab in the left navigation
- At the bottom of the left navigation now click on the Additional Features section (you might have to expand it)
- Click on “Easy Subscribe Bookmarklet” and follow the instructions in the right hand window
- (Optional) Move the “Sub with Bloglines” bookmark to the top of your Favorites list or add it into a link folder for easy access
Once this is done you are set to easily add new RSS feeds to Bloglines. Each time you are on a blog (e.g., www.sagecircle.wordpress.com) or a Twitter account (e.g., www.twitter.com/carterlusher and www.twitter.com/daveeckert) that you wish to add do the following:
- Go to your Favorites and click on “Sub with Bloglines” bookmark
- You will see the Bloglines page and under the row of tabs, there will be a section called Available Feeds
- For simplicity sake, pick the first feed and leave the options at their default settings
- Scroll down until you see the “Subscribe” button and click it
- If successful, the Feeds tab will open in the left window with the new feed at the bottom
- Click on “Edit” just below the Feed tab to move the new feed to a folder
While the vast majority of blogs and Twitter streams have RSS feeds that Bloglines can find, you will occasionally get the following message in a blue bar “No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.” In these situations I merely create a regular bookmark for the blog or Twitter and check manually.
Folders – I use a series of folders to organize the feeds by community and type (see example at right). The advantage of this approach is that rather than open each feed individually I can open all the feeds with new entries by clicking on the folder icon. I can still open the folders and click on individual feeds if I want, but clicking on the folder saves time and that does add up. To create a folder, click on “Edit” just below the Feed tab and then click on “New Folder” icon. After naming the folder you can drag any feed into that folder. This allows you to create your own organizational structure.
Monitoring traffic -I go to Bloglines two or three times a day and check for new entries. The illustration is pretty typical of the traffic I get in a six hour or so period. Even though I track over 250 individual feeds there are really not that many new items added every day. If I am disciplined and check a couple times a day it rarely takes me more than 15 minutes to scan new items, make a few notes for later followup, and immediately respond/comment where necessary. In addition, if I have a few spare minutes (e.g., on hold for a teleconference) I can quickly expand one or two folders to see what is up. One gets pretty good at using odd moments to check Twitter or the blogs.
* We have an AR Briefing on this technique that we can deliver via webinar to facilitate getting an AR team up to speed quickly with minimum effort. AR Briefings are a standard deliverable included with the Annual Advisory Service. In addition, Advisory clients can set up inquiries to discuss how to add social media to their toolbox in a practical manner.
Bottom Line: Using this technique, I have reduced my social media traffic monitoring time from several hours a day to 30 to 45 minutes. The process now feels much less burdensome and much more efficient. I now look forward to the times when I check the blogs and Twitter because it’s a fun break from my other tasks.
Question: What tips and tricks do you have to make simple monitoring of traffic fast and efficient?
Since 2000, SageCircle has helped analyst relations teams to focus on business value by encouraging innovative thinking that leverages insights and drives revenue.
Thats sounds like a great way of keeping up with mentions you want to hear about. The only problem I can see with this is you actually have to know about the source sites in the first place to add them.
What about the mentions on sites you don’t know about?
I guess if you are strict with yourself and keep updating your list your coverage will grow day by day.
It seems a good starting point. When I first starting looking at ways of doing this I couldn’t find a good method! Hence SentimentMetrics was born!
Great stuff!
Leon
SentimentMetrics.com
This generic comment is obviously just placed as advertising, but it does seem relevant and could be a useful service to explore.
Question is if they actually follow analysts – or just search on all occurrences of a company name? Of course that may be good as well.
For example, would a Google search of SUN yield the same thing as a start? Would you trust their rankings of “perception”?
Hi,
Sure I wanted to mention a service I am involved in as its highly relevant to what you are talking about.
I think my point is valid you are only collecting information from sources you know. It’s the sources you don’t know about that could be the most useful or harmful specifically because you don’t know about them .
To answer your question we look across all types of media for mentions concerning a “phrase” it could be a brand, individual or topic.
Let me know if you are interested in taking a look
Thanks
Leon
This post is my first realization that you and Dave don’t recommend using the Tekrati Blogs Directory or the OPML. Instead, you’re pointing your readers to Bloglines. I’m devastated, gentlemen. Absolutely crushed.
Barbara,
SageCircle has pointed readers to the Tekrati Analyst Blog Directory a number of times (simply do a search to find examples).
Either I wasn’t clear or you misinterpreted the purpose of this post. The goal of this post is to point out a technique where folks could easily and quickly track blogs and Twitter streams. For this task I deem a RSS reader to be the most efficient tool, because a RSS reader creates one queue in which I can easily see and scan a select group of blogs and Twitter streams.
WhiIe the Tekrati Analyst Blog Directory gives users the ability to look up recent activity for any blog in the directory, it is not a replacement for a RSS reader. The Tekrati directory does not appear to support tracking blogs not in the directory or tracking Twitter streams. Nor does the Tekrati directory permit a user to track a specific subset of analyst blogs in a single queue.
If the Tekrati directory can easily create an easy-to-scan queue of tweets as well as blog post of both analyst and non-analyst blogs, then I would be delighted to use it and recommend it for this purpose.