How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic - Page 2
Banish Content Overload
By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step!
Pretty Up Your Collection
We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful.
Check Out the Hotness
By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too.
Import Into a Feed Reader
Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do!
Make a List of the Links You Found
There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step.
Make a Reference Search Engine!
Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb.
Want to see what the results look like? Here's the Custom Search Engine we've got so far for Top Education Blogs. <-- Feel free to bookmark that and use it anytime, or suggest more links we should add to it.
Finally, Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too
Blogs are great, but they aren't the only place where important discussion is going on online - not in almost any field anymore. Thought leaders in the education blogosphere are also having a lot of conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed, they are uploading presentations to SlideShare and participating in other online communities. You can connect with them quickly and easily by using the Google Social Graph API. Martin Atkins has built a very handy little interface that anyone can use to discover social media accounts registered to a person's name. We use that daily.
In the example above, Dave Perry of Academhack mentioned his Twitter account, so we searched for his Twitter name in the Google People Search site and found his Slideshare account too. This will work better for some people than for others, but sometimes it's a really big help.
So there you go. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to discover the top bloggers in any field, view or subscribe to just their most popular posts, search against their archives and befriend them elsewhere around the web! We hope this has been useful. Thanks for following along. If you can suggest better steps to take at any point in this process, or additional things you like to do - we'd love to hear about it!
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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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