Posts Tagged ‘tools’

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Five Tools For Drinking From The Firehose

09.05.14

Over the last few weeks I’ve presented to a number of groups around ’101′ social media topics – how to get started, practical pointers, and ethical issues in social media. 

People often express shock at the sheer volume of tools and information out there in social media. It can be overwhelming, for sure.

So how can you avoid drowning in information? What are some of the best ways to filter through the noise and find the signal?

Google Reader

RSS will save your sanity when you start to get involved in social media. Instead of having to check 10, 20 or 100 sites for changes all the time, RSS feeds let you pull all of the updates into one place.

I always look to Google Reader when recommending a particular RSS reader – it’s web-based so it’s cross-platform, it’s available remotely and it’s easy to use. Other options include Feed Demon and Bloglines.

PostRank

If your RSS reader is getting clogged with too many feeds, PostRank may be your saviour.

My “A-list” of blogs alone covers about 50 sites. It’s a rare day when I can get to all of them. PostRank (formerly known as AideRSS) helps to filter your feeds by the level of “engagement” on posts. If you’re busy, just ask for the best posts out of your subscriptions, and read a few. If you have more time on your hands, read a few more. If you use Google Reader, the process is made even easier through PostRank’s Firefox extension, which lets you apply that filtering directly in your reader.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck just keeps getting better and has become the automatic choice for many people due to its powerful sorting functionality. If you follow any significant number of people, the volume of conversation flowing through Twitter can be overwhelming. Tweetdeck helps you to manage this through grouping your followers and setting-up searches for the terms that are important to you.

MicroPlaza

MicroPlaza aggregates all of the links posted on Twitter by people you follow, and a list of all the people who posted those same links. You can subscribe to that list via RSS and pull it into your RSS reader, further reducing the effort required to consume all this information. If, like me, you use Twitter to populate your reading list, that can be a powerful tool.

Still, if you follow a lot of people you could drown under that list of links. Fortunately, MicroPlaza lets you create groups of people you trust, aggregate their links and subscribe to just those links. Voila – your own personal newsfeed.

Delicious

Want to avoid having to trawl through the noise to get to the interesting posts? Why not make use of other peoples’ recommendations?

Delicious lets you subscribe via RSS to the bookmarks of other people. Create a network of people who you trust and you can subscribe to that, too. Alternatively, search for key terms that are important to you and subscribe to those results. You instantly have a continuing feed of sites that other people have found sufficiently valuable to save.

These are five of the key tools I use to keep things manageable. What do you use?

Posted in: social media, tools

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Don’t Like What You See? Fix It

09.03.25

Over the last little while I’ve seen numerous people complaining about how some social media tools are becoming “too mainstream” for their liking. For them, as more and more people join services like Facebook and Twitter, they lose their relevance and usefulness.

My response: Social media tools are opt-in, so if you don’t like what you see, fix it.

Recently, I mentioned that I wasn’t a fan of the high volume of automated Alltop tweets in Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter stream… so I don’t follow him. It’s nothing personal; just me controlling what I want to see in my stream. You can apply a similar principle across your social media toolkit. You don’t need to bail completely out of using these tools just because of the way people are using them.

  • If you don’t like the large number of new people signing up for Twitter, don’t follow them.
  • If your Twitter stream is too populated for your liking, cull it.
  • If you don’t want to connect to that long-lost high-school boyfriend/girlfriend on Facebook, don’t.
  • If someone’s blog has shifted focus and you no longer like it, don’t subscribe.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give feedback to others, or that other people should disregard that feedback. That’s still important.

It does mean that you have the power to control your online experience… so quit complaining and do it.

Posted in: facebook, social media, tools, Twitter

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MicroPlaza – Your Personal Micro-News Service

09.03.20

Over the last couple of days, I’ve spent some timechecking out MicroPlaza, the latest in a long line of services that have sprung up around Twitter. The difference between this one and most of the others?

This one is useful.

Summary

MicroPlaza aggregates all of the links tweeted by the people you follow. Every time one of your friends posts a link on Twitter, MicroPlaza records the message, along with the tweets of other people who have posted that same link. 

You can sort the links by date or by popularity (the number of people who have tweeted that link). You can also bookmark links and retweet your favourites from within the site.

Organizing

This could all be a little much – if you follow lots of people the number of links could get overwhelming – but MicroPlaza also lets you create “tribes” – groups of your followers whose links you can view separately.

Now, I’m not really interested in new high-maintenance services – especially those that are built on top of other high-maintenance services. This makes it especially useful to be able to subscribe to both your full feed AND your tribes via RSS. 

Practical uses

How might MicroPlaza be useful?

  • Read what your friends read – create a ‘tribe’ of your friends and subscribe to that tribe.
  • Keep up with your workmates – create a ‘tribe’ with your colleagues.
  • Research – create a ‘tribe’ of experts in a chosen area and learn from them.
  • Stay on the leading edge – create a ‘tribe’ of people who are on the cutting edge of whatever topic you like.
  • Competitive intelligence – follow your competitors, create a ‘tribe’ with their accounts, and see what they’re reading.

See how useful this could be?

(Thanks to Danny Brown for the invite to check this out.)

Posted in: tools, Twitter

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What’s Your Favourite Tool For Monitoring Conversations?

08.11.01

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media monitoring recently. I’m presenting on the topic at a couple of upcoming conferences, and I’m spending an increasing amount of time working in this area in my day job.

623562_whispered_secret_1As conversations become increasingly fragmented – blogs and discussion boards/forums are no longer the only source of discussion out there – they’re becoming increasingly more complex to monitor.

What’s more, there are thousands upon thousands of conversations happening, in real-time, online. The sheer quantity is almost overwhelming and it’s only going up.

So what do we do?

There are plenty of tools out there that let us monitor online conversations…

…the free ones, for example…

…and the professional ones, for example…

The search and monitoring tools out there are almost as diverse as the media we’re monitoring, and I’m seeing increasing interest from organizations in using these tools to listen.

So, I have a question for you:

What is your favourite monitoring tool (or tools)?

What have you found to be the most comprehensive/easiest to use/most logical/most cost effective?

What services might the rest of us have missed?

(If you want to hear more about social media monitoring, I’m presenting a workshop on the topic as part of a "Social Media Master Class" at The Canadian Institute’s Social Media conference in December and I’m doing a session on the topic at PodCamp Toronto 2009.)

Posted in: measurement, social media

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How To Set Up A Simple Online Monitoring System

08.06.25

Whispered secretBefore your organization launches a blog, before you start playing with Facebook, before you even think about Twitter, you should be listening to what people are saying about you.

I did this recently for my last employer in preparation for a high-profile event and received a lot of questions afterwards about how I went about it. My answer: it’s not that hard.

In this post I’ll walk you through three simple steps to setting up a basic system to monitor your online world. Note: There are professional tools available to do all of this and more – Radian6 for example – which you may want to check out if you have the budget for it.

You’ll need six free tools (+1 more for a bonus) to mimic the setup I used:

There are three simple steps to setting-up your system (plus the bonus if you choose):

  1. Define your keywords
  2. Create your searches
  3. Plug the results into your RSS reader
  4. Bonus: Filter your searches through AideRSS

Step 1: Define your keywords

Before you even switch on your computer, think about the different words and phrases you want to track. These could be brands, executives, spokespeople, competitors, stakeholders, products, programs or whatever else you want to monitor.

Some of your terms may initially be a little broad; you may want to narrow them down by adding creating ‘boolean’ queries, for example:

  • Executive name AND company name
  • Competitor name OR competitor product name

Step 2: Create your searches

(Note: this step happens at the same time as step 3 – as you create each of your searches you’ll plug them into your RSS reader.)

I used five different search tools for my system:

  • Google News for mainstream news coverage
  • Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Blogpulse for blog searches
  • Summize for Twitter coverage (Tweetscan would also suffice)

Plug each of your keywords and phrases into each of these search engines.

A couple of pointers:

  • Google lets you use parentheses to structure your search, so you could do:
    (brand name OR product name OR executive name) AND company name
  • Use the advanced searches in Technorati and Blogpulse to give yourself more options

You don’t need to use all three blog search tools – I used all three to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. If, however, you want to just use one tool, use Google Blogsearch as the ability to use parentheses in your searches can let you create one query for all your searches – much more manageable if you decide to use the bonus step later.

Step 3: Plug the results into your RSS reader

Each of the search engines I’ve mentioned here provides search results in RSS form. As you run the queries for each search term you came up with, click the “RSS” or “Subscribe” links on the results page and subscribe to the results in your RSS reader of choice.

Subscribe link in Technorati

 Subscribe link in Google Blogsearch
Note: Blogpulse can be a little flaky – you may need to try importing feeds from there a few times before it will work.

Bonus – Step 4: Filter your searches through AideRSS

AideRSS is a free online tool that helps you to filter through your RSS feeds and filter out “the noise,” leaving you able to focus on the important posts.

You may not need to use this if you don’t anticipate a lot of coverage. If, however, you expect to find a lot of online conversations about your organization, this may be worth exploring. It does take a little time to set up but it’s very easy to do so. What’s more, AideRSS’ technical support is superb – very responsive and helpful.

To run all of your searches through AideRSS, use your RSS reader to export an OPML file of your feeds

Google Reader - Export your subscriptions

Then go to AideRSS.com and create a free account. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab and import your OPML file. Once the site has imported all of your feeds (this may take some time) you can set the level of filtering you want for each of them.

The last step is then to subscribe to the RSS feed that AideRSS creates for you, et voila! You have an RSS feed of your coverage, filtered for you!

(You can then unsubscribe from your original searches if you like, or archive them for future reference)

Suggestions?

I used this approach to set up a quick and dirty monitoring service for a high-profile issue and provided an update & analysis every 90 minutes to executives. Still, this isn’t a comprehensive solution and it certainly doesn’t offer the functionality of a professional product. However, for those just starting out or those without the budget for a paid solution, it should suffice.

What do you think about this approach? What would you change here?

Posted in: 201, how to, social media, tools

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