Web Worker Daily

Quite a few people seemed to enjoy last week’s post about How To Monitor Online Conversations, so I thought it would be a good idea to explain how to make a monitoring dashboard to make it easy to track what’s being said online about you, your company, your competitors and anything else you need to keep an eye on. The key to monitoring dashboards is to set them up in a way that you can check them frequently, quickly and easily.

When I talk about monitoring “dashboards,” I use the term very loosely. In some cases, I set clients up with RSS readers that have a typical dashboard look and feel for monitoring feeds, while in other cases the “dashboard” is really a monitoring section in an existing RSS reader with the feeds delivered as an OPML file.

In my experience, people who are new to RSS readers tend to do better with a reader that looks more like a dashboard than the a tree or folder structure. This is particularly true for monitoring because a dashboard lets you see more information at a glance. Netvibes and iGoogle are both good choices for new users. However, I think that the Netvibes layout tends to work slightly better for this purpose. Here’s an example of a monitoring dashboard built using Netvibes:

However, I personally use NetNewsWire for my RSS reader. I have my monitoring dashboards set up in folders that don’t in any way resemble a typical dashboard. Try out a few different readers to find the one that works best for your style and usage. The tool that you select isn’t the critical element. The real magic is in the content that you are monitoring.

I monitor three primary types of content in my dashboards: vanity mentions, competition and industry analysis.

Vanity mentions are the conversations that people are having about you, your company, your products and your employees. Keep a close eye on these mentions so you can respond quickly to questions and concerns. A proactive approach to monitoring and responding to discussions can help you avoid potential issues before they get out of hand and can show people that you are responsive to your customers. I track vanity mentions for companies that I am involved with across Twitter, blog searches, Flickr, various video sites, FriendFeed and more.

You can get interesting insights about your competition and their activities by proactively monitoring their communications and what other people say about them online. I often monitor competitors blogs, press releases, support forums, job postings and personal blogs or social media accounts of key employees, in addition to monitoring mentions of the competition on various sources.

Industry analysis should also be part of your monitoring dashboard. Monitor blogs written by thought leaders within your industry along with tracking for mentions of keywords that are important to your organization or your interests. I often use this section of the monitoring dashboard as a way to find content for blog posts. It can be a great way to see what other people are talking about in your industry and give you an opportunity to respond to, disagree with or build on interesting ideas from other people.

In addition to the dashboard technology, I use tools like Yahoo Pipes and PostRank to help me find relevant content and filter it down to the pieces that are the most important for my purposes. If you have never used Yahoo Pipes, I have several two-minute Yahoo Pipes video demos that can help you learn what you need to get started.

How do you monitor online conversations? What kind of monitoring dashboards do you use?

Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. As a freelance consultant, I not only need to keep up with what people are saying about me and my company, but I also need to monitor the latest industry trends to learn new skills and stay relevant. While wearing my blogging hat, I also have to keep up with conversations that would be interesting to web workers for this blog, or relevant for people building online communities for my own blog.

Interesting conversations are happening all over the web, on blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and many other sites. People are talking about you, your company and your industry, and revealing many tips and tricks that you should know. I am a self-confessed data junkie, so I have a few tips to help you make sense of the massive amounts of data available and to focus on monitoring just what really matters. Read the rest of this entry »

In my recent post about using Harvest to track my time, I discovered that I was spending too much of my time consuming information. As a result, I’ve been working on ways to further increase my efficiency, starting with some Twitter efficiency improvements, and I thought that a post about becoming more efficient at consuming blogs and other news content via RSS would be a good next step.

I love information and wish I could spend more time reading and consuming it, to learn more about a variety of topics. However, the harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend reading and learning. I could take the easy way out and just read less, but my goal is to become more efficient at finding the content that I want to read the most. Read the rest of this entry »

A combination of events yesterday got me thinking about how much time I spend sifting my Twitter stream for valuable, work-related and/or professionally useful information. First, fellow WWD writer Aliza Sherman posted a tweet about starting a second account to follow only those twitterers you really want to pay special attention to. Then, Chris Morin posted a comment on my post about key web working skills in 2009 that brought up the same issue.

I’m not even following a very large number of people, and yet if I add it up, mining my tweets takes up a fair amount of my time during the day. I considered doing as Aliza suggests, but that would also mean switching accounts to post under my main identity, or else using a program that supports multiple accounts at once.

Not willing to make the trade, I started looking around for alternative solutions. That’s when I found Twalala, a third party Twitter client that boasts improved control. Twalala allows you to filter your twitstream by keyword or phrase, and you can temporarily silence twitterers who might be getting on your nerves and/or spamming.

Read the rest of this entry »

Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.

My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content. Read the rest of this entry »