Listening is my new obsession. I’m setting up a listening post for a client and I can’t stop clicking links to find new folks to listen to. I’m pretty sure this is connected to my obsession with other people’s pictures. But, I digress.
Don’t know what a Listening Post is? It means aggregating all the blogs you read and terms you’d like to search for into one location–the most common free one is Google Reader. Google Reader lets you subscribe to RSS or feeds from the blogs you read. Chris Brogan offers a succinct summary of the steps required to set up a Reader. But the long and short of it is that it is an online subscription. Think of it as an actionable newspaper.
Your Reader can be just for your reading pleasure. But most likely, it’s content that you’ll want to share. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are great platforms for sharing interesting links. What better way to demonstrate the range of your knowledge and the boundlessness of your curiosity than to share these links with other folks who have similar interests.
The key to creating a good reader is finding the right content to subscribe to. And this is where the addictive part comes in. Trolling through blogs is like searching through a treasure chest, digging deep for a really great vintage broach or like a crazy funky pirate ring.
Here are the simple first steps I’ve found work well:
- Low Hanging Fruit: Gather feeds from the sites you read regularly. This’ll just make it simpler.
- Competitor Sites: Never hurts to keep your eye on the competition
- What your Key Audiences Read: If you know government stakeholders are reading the blog, then you should subscribe to policy feeds. If farmers are your audience, then you should be subscribing to this wonderful blog called The Bovine. Now you see why it’s so addictive. Who knew such a wonderful niche blog existed.
- Review your Twitter Feed: Many of the people you follow and who follow you write blogs. There’s a good chance that you have alot in common. Check out their blogs and subscribe if the fit is right.
- (Luke) Use the Links: Review the links on sites you find relevant and then start clicking like mad. Don’t be overwhelmed, like I said, most sites suck. Depending on your industry very few will be subscription worthy.
- Subscribe to Keywords: This part’s kinda fun. Set up Google Alerts for words you want to monitor across the entire world wide web-o-sphere. Google Alerts gives you the option of feeding this information directly into your Reader. It sounds complicated. But I swear it’s not. What kids of words should you be searching for?
- Your organization’s name, name variations and your url (so, if you’re company is Shur Thing, you should search for ShurThing and www.shurthing.com)
- Your name and the names of others you want to follow (like your mentor and the competition’s executives)
- Competitors, with variations and urls
- Keywords. Want to keep track of new California wineries? Use those very terms.
