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In my post a few days ago about Monitoring the Conversation, I mentioned the importance of Listening and promised my ASTD-OC friends that I'd post an article about some of the free automation tools I use to help me listen to online conversations. And it's here in the automation discussion that a related question sometimes comes up about whether or not it's ever a good idea to use bots or automation engines when engaging others in the social web. In a nutshell, yes. I said as much in an article I wrote this summer, Automating Social Media - Good or Bad?
The gist is this: leveraging automation, bots, engines, and so on, to alert you to topics, keywords, phrases and conversations that are of interest to you = good idea. But, when you respond in places where those conversations are happening, don't automate that part. That's the personal part that should come from YOU, not an assistant nor a 'bot. Easy enough?
With that said, here's the first of several tools/techniques you can easily start NOW to get a leg up on who's saying what.
o RSS. This is also known as a news feed reader. RSS means "Really Simple Syndication." But that's not important. What is important, is that it's a tool that allows you to "subscribe" to your favorite blogs, news sites and even search results from some popular search engines. The cool factor is in the one-stop-shop setup it affords you for getting updates from all those places.
In other words, instead of having to alternately go to each of 10 sites (or 50 sites or 100 sites) whose content you regularly follow (or would like to if it didn't take so long to navigate to each of those sites!), you can instead subscribe to their "RSS feeds" (I'll show you below) and view updates on one web site containing all those subscriptions. Wala: One-stop-shopping (well, reading, you get my drift).
First things first: Sign Up for An RSS Feed Reader
1. If you don't have a favored RSS feed reader at the moment, you might just as well go to www.google.com/reader and start a Google account, if you don't already have one. Otherwise, sign in.
2. Open a new window or a new tab in your web browser and navigate to one of your favorite blog sites and look for a little "RSS button." It looks like this: . Right-click it and select "Copy Link." (Hint, and, shameless plug: There's a similar button in the right sidebar of my blog. Feel free to start with that one.
3. Now, go back to Google Reader and click the "Add Subscription" button. It looks like this:
4. In the field that appears, Paste the link you copied from Step 2 above.
5. Click the Add button.
6. Wash, rinse, repeat for each blog you typically follow.
Henceforth and forever after, all you have to do is go to your Google Reader site to read any new updates on each of your subscribed blogs. (Unread articles will be highlighted in a slightly different color or typeface until you've read it or marked it as having been read. In this way, you can easily scan what's new and what's not.)
I hope that helps! In my next post, I'll tell you how to add keyword search results to your RSS feed reader.
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