How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic
Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.
Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.
Works With Just About Anything
We'll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we've got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though.
If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work - check out this post, where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could.
In the following 13 steps, we'll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post.
No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method - but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to "join the conversation" - because they aren't sure where to find the conversation. Here's how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn't a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it's a good place to start from.
Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow.
Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field
There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you're looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post. Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order - the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we're running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity. Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes.. These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity.
So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two.
Add The Feeds to a Reader
We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it's easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn't matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it's the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources.
We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes.
Once you've got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it's time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there's more that we're going to do with these blogs. When you're in the "add feed" screen, you'll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It's really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We're now going to edit an OPML file - but don't be scared! It's easy, we promise. Anyone can do it.
Pull Out Your New Tab's Feeds
This step assumes you've using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that's not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step.
The Top of the OPML File.
Don't delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don't you feel smart? That was really easy though!
Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs
Now that you've got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You'll need to create an account, and the service doesn't allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails - Gmail considers them the same thing? It's true, that's an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that's how you've got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file.
Rank the Blog Posts With Robots!
Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you'll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they've processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it's been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It's then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed.
What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs' own communities of readers. That's valuable information! It's a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you'll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank!
If you're interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here's the OPML file we built with the feeds we've found so far: Top Education Blogs - Greatest Hits. Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader.
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I dare you to find one baker or candlestick maker that will go through all of that.
Looks like it's time to start that social media PR firm, after all. Business will be booming!
Wow, this is 1 heck of a cheat sheet Marshall. Thank you very much.
I've never tried to create a custom search engine. Maybe I should try that next.
This is good! It is now easier to sort blogs and sites of your topics of interest.
Killer post indeed. You should write a book on this topic Marshall.
Posted by: Mike Reynolds
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January 9, 2009 6:39 PM
Ok. Maybe it's because I'm exhausted. But I think I need to hire a tutor on this one.
I'll be back. I'm nerdy that way.
-Renee (a.k.a. CodeKiller)
Excellento. I love great posts like this where you can learn, step by step, from someone who can break things down into simple concepts. Thanks Marshall.
great post!
Posted by: Pico Seno
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January 9, 2009 7:13 PM
A good read :)
Posted by: AJ Batac
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January 9, 2009 7:17 PM
Great post, and the amount of steps and technical detail required almost guarantees there's a market still alive to help bakers and candlestick makers get through this research.
i agree about getting small business owners to do all of that...maybe down the road...after enough highly motivated small biz's actually do this and see the results...more of small biz owners will see the benefit and actually do it.
great advice...i have added you to my must read list.
Very Good and Useful Article, Marshall! :)
Thank You for Sharing this "Social Media Cheat Sheet" with us all, Marshall! :)
And ...
Everyone Have a Great Day! :)
Thanks for this. especially the mLoovi info. I'm trying to create one out of Japanese news site RSS feeds. Don't know why, but couldn't get netvibes to recognize the mLoovi generated link to their Japanese translation of my own site's RSS feed.
Regardless, I love the idea. I've been looking for something like this like, forever. Probably translations of feeds is too ambitious to start, so I'll think of something I've wanted to find blogs about in English and try this out. Later. After a break. (whew)
me again ... sorry, I mean, I couldn't get netvibes to recognize the mLoovi link to the english translation feed of a japanese RSS feed. if that makes sense. sorry.
Katie, sometimes the feed server doesn't respond fast enough and sometimes Netvibes falls asleep. If you keep having a hard time with Netvibes you might try Pageflakes.com - essentially the same thing.
I wonder how many new startups just launched, trying to solve this problem.
I don't know if I'm more amazed at the depth of this post, or the fact that I somehow actually understood it.
Excellent job! I will definitely implement into my work.
Its okay for people who have technical knowledge. But I myself know lots of people who want to do this but would not be able to do it even if they read the things for 100 times.
Keral - you are right. There are many people for whom these instructions will still be inaccessible. I hope that they will be helpful for many others, though.
hey - top stuff. thanks for sharing...
Still one of the smartest people I know. Great cards you're tipping here, Marshall.
Superb article Marshall. Some techniques are complementary to what I've done for datavisualization.ch and could be usefull additions. Thanks!
Great post, Marshall! Easy to understand and educational. Thanks a lot!
I appreciate the reference you've made to Education and educators. It's an interesting post indeed.
Excellent post. Not only had I not heard of PostRank, but the method of filtering and organizing the list of blogs to something useful is excellent.
Marshall,
This is one of the most instructive posts I've ever seen on the topic. Great stuff. Thanks.
Wow, I think you hit the nail on the head
www.privacy-tools.at.tc
Interesting post, well detailed for the newbies out there.
Marshall Great Tips. I will have to try using Netvibes instead of iGoogle.
Interesting way to use this concept at:
http://www.federalcreditscore.com
Marshall: Thanks for this... already bookmarked this for Dell. Great stuff.
Will definitely be utilizing this. Thanks again.
Wicked post and well written. Cheers.
Best post ever! so incredibly useful!
Marshall, you're like a mad scientist building some beautiful monster.
Well done. I've used many of these tools before, but it's great to have a step-by-step to refer to making sure I don't forget anything, or showing someone how to do it without having to teach them myself.
Great tips - I'm also throwing together some more tools people can use to analyze and identify quality blogs and people...the first version of the first one you can check out already at http://www.halfbite.com - what it will let you do is analyze the tweet stream of any twitter user (or group of twitter users)...with the idea being you can see the sorts of things they really tweet about over time, how often they tweet, who they talk to the most, what links they tweet about, etc. etc. etc.
A second tool that's in the VERY early stages (but already a bit usable) is for checking the 'buzz' on a given blog post (or URL)...it's at http://www.jivegas.com (but be warned it's still in the dev. stages and so it will probably change a lot over the next few days/weeks).
Anyway - + one to the above comments about you writing a book on this sort of thing -- would be VERY popular (I know I'd buy a copy). :-)
Actually there's a work around that doesn't require making a new account on PostRank if you want multiple feeds. When you export from netvibes, the feeds are categorized under their tab name. When these are then imported to PostRank it will use the tab name as a feed tag. You then click the Channels button in PostRank and use the appropriate tag rss feed, rather than the one for "all"
Or, you can find articles, blog posts and more on specific business topics added by and voted up (via activity) by your peers at BusinessWeek's Business Exchange.
Full disclosure, I work for BusinessWeek (but I'd recommend it even if I didn't)
Hmm, interesting. I'll have to look into this.
I loooved this post. If you wrote a book about this topic, I'd also buy a copy!
One of the most useful posts I have ever read.
Hmm, interesting. I'll have to look into this..
Marshall -- this is brilliant stuff. In response to your first commenter, I've tried to automate most of this process using Yahoo! Pipes. With two notable exceptions this is possible -- there's no ranking by popularity (yet) and there's no human editorial intervention (I don't think I can imagine a way to automate that!)
However, the automation speeds the process up somewhat, which means that a researcher could pull multiple searches in the period that it would have taken them to pull one manually. That may have some benefit. Link here for the blog post/explanation/link to Pipe: http://icanhaz.com/marshallplan
What a helpful post. I'll be sure to move it around.
It is a great idea and will use it for clients to show some of the bakers what they are missing, but I think the process is a little much for clergy and laymen not into slicing and dicing html.
Although this may be tricky for many I find it very useful. I am not new to feeds but the "workflow" here is really interesting. I mean I had used some of these methods separately but organized this way look like a wonderful tool to get the hottest posts. Thanks for sharing this.
@Mat Morrison: thanks for the link. Pipes is a useful tool; I'll take a look at what you did.
@Marshall Kirkpatrick: thanks for a very substantive and useful post! Lots to chew on here. This would be a good thread to keep open, and see what people come up with.
Marshall,
This is really good. I was getting great results with xfruits and regator, but now with this method, I am aware of more outlets per topic than before. Thank you for this.
that's a hot tool!
Posted by: Jim Gray
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January 11, 2009 3:56 PM
Marshall,great stuff. keep it coming!
ı have followed your writing for a long time.really you have given very successful information.
In spite of my english trouale,I am trying to read and understand your writing.
And ı am following frequently.I hope that you will be with us together with much more scharings.
I hope that your success will go on.
An alternative way to do this is by using Yahoo Pipes (a free service from Yahoo). All you have to do is find the url of the blog that you want to get the feed from, use a filter pipe to get the exact content you are looking for, add a pipe to sort by time and get an aggregated pipe to give you an rss feed. This feed goes easily into your any rss reader and gives you only the info you want.
Kishore Dharmarajan
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