Eavesdropping and Digging for Pirate Rings

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:

1. Low Hang­ing Fruit: Gather feeds from the sites you read reg­u­larly. This’ll just make it simpler.
2. Com­peti­tor Sites: Never hurts to keep your eye on the competition
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. (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.
6. 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.

Related posts:

1. Google just changed search. Again. Four ways.
2. How Big is Facebook?
3. Shit No One Needs: KD with Freeze Dried Cauliflower
4. PSA: How to find anything online
5. The Lure of Faux Authenticity