Know your RSS from your elbow

I mentioned Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site last week. It comes out of beta tomorrow. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has an interview with Guy, which you can watch on the Mashable site or below. I’m pleased to say that this blog is on the social media page at Alltop, so check it out. And then check out the whole gamut of sites that makes Alltop such a great resource.

The web is a resource that can, at times, seem miraculous in its depth and abundance. Unfortunately, that abundance can also be a major shortcoming for those of us who have to work in human years. More and more ’stuff’ - of quality that ranges from essential to mind-numbingly inconsequential - gets added at a phenomenal rate. We talk a lot about conversations at bpodr but there’s a danger of serious hearing loss unless you know how to tune out the majority of the noise.

Social networks play a crucial role in helping you to focus. Letting recommendations and tips and hints guide you through the web is a constructive way to find the bulk of what you need on any given topic. It’s a two-way street, of course, and your own recommendations help others know what rocks your boat. This is the currency of social networking.

Step one, of course, is finding the people you trust to give you the first recommendations. I like to think that bpodr will serve as a node in your network of trust. One of the things we’re doing is building a blogroll to point you to blogs and experts that we trust in the field of social media. We’ve deliberately not started with a long list of links: over time as Adam and I reference particular blogs in posts we’ll add the link to the blogroll. It’s a bit like building trust slowly.

Each of the blogs we reference, of course, will have their own blogroll and you can happily follow links across the web from there. Or you can always start at ‘the top’ in a category by going to Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Alltop. This does some of the hard work for you by listing the best-read and respected sites on the web for categories ranging from Cars to Music to Politics and, of course, Social Media.

I’ve just added Alltop to our blogroll, too.

This is the final post in my short series on listening. In the previous two (here and here) I looked at why listening was so important for companies attempting to find new ways of connecting with their customers. This post is a practical look at some of the ways to make listening a conscious action.

Al Alvarez is a wonderful writer. He writes criticism, essays, non-fiction studies of subjects as diverse as poker, mountaineering, divorce, and working on oil rigs. He’s also a poet and a novelist and has written a superb autobiography called “Where Did It All Go Right?”. In a recent series of lectures - now published in book form as “The Writer’s Voice” - he introduces his subject like this:

“…in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false.”

There are two key points here. Firstly, that writers and readers share a common trait; and secondly, the ability to detect what’s authentic. But let’s leave the world of literature and apply these insights to social marketing. Traditional marketing ‘listened’ through surveys and opinion polls, market research and measuring media coverage. All, quite obviously, driven from ‘above’ and producing results that could easily be interpreted in whatever way best suited the marketers. There was no way to gauge what was authentic, in other words. Worse, the only voices heard were those both willing to be interrupted and to respond. Over time, this method almost guarantees that the marketers and the market are heading on separate paths.

Finding the conversation
To start listening, you need to find the conversation. You want to know what people are saying about your products and your company. Given the size of the internet and the vast numbers of people using it, this might seem an impossible task. Luckily, however, there are tools that make the task slightly less Herculean. Here are three simple methods of determining where you are being discussed:

• Google alerts - anyone can set up an alert on Google and, whenever your search term (eg. “purple king-sized super widget”) is found by Google, you’ll receive an email pointing to the link.
• del.icio.us - this takes a bit more work but if anyone has created a shared bookmark and tagged it with your company name or your product name, it will be here. You can widen your search to take in competitors and similar products, of course. The aim is to discover some of the authoratitive voices on the internet that may be discussing you.
• technorati - at the time of writing this post technorati claims to be “Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.” One of its most useful features is that it clearly shows you how long ago a blog pot was written, so you can get a sense of when activity peaked on a certain conversation.

Passive listening (or tracking the conversation)
Once you’ve found the opinion makers and thought leaders or the forums where your type of products are discussed, it’s time to put in place a method for tracking the conversation.

The best way to keep track of blog conversations is via RSS. Adam put up a post here recently explaining what RSS is and what it does. Keeping track of your feeds is easy with a feed reader. I use Google’s reader but if you prefer an off-line version, give FeedDemon a try.

When conversations take place on forums, it can mean that you need to visit the forum regularly to keep up with the discussion. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it reinforces the listening habit. Remember why you’re doing this? It’s easy to lurk on a forum and just listen. Sometimes, forums have functionality to allow you to receive an email when a particular discussion is updated. Check the FAQ of any forum you join or visit to find out some of the ins and outs.

Active listening (or joining the conversation)
Lurking and eavesdropping are all very well for a while. But it can become a bit frustrating hearing only one side of the conversation. Now it’s time to let your voice be heard. If you’ve been paying attention in the forums and to the blog posts you’ve been reading, you should have a feel for the tone, topics, and limits for each conversation. Now’s the time to let them know you’re there.

One of the quickest wins comes from simply leaving a comment on a blog. If there’s a post that directly relates to you, your company, or one of its products, state your view. Let them know who you are and why you can talk with authority. If a post refers to a case of poor customer service, for instance, tell them you’ll look into it. Do that and report back your findings and you’ll find that immediately some of the bad press is diminished.

The next step is to start your own blog. Use it to ask questions and drive traffic to it by leaving comments on other blogs and forums. Make it a blog that matters to the audience you have been listening to.

Listening as call to action
As you establish your credibility, honesty, and authenticity through your blog and your willingness to listen, you’ll find that you can begin to shape the conversation. This is not about advertising: it’s about sharing news and information with an audience that is interested. They are reading your blog: you are not interrupting. Where before, this audience wanted to talk about your products and company but were limited to rumours and opinion, now they have a real-life horse’s mouth to get the facts from. You’ll stilled be called up on mistakes and bad judgement but the long-term ill effects will be minimal and be heavily outweighed by the positive effects.

Get listening today.

For those of you who are already bloggers, Wired has a great ‘interactive’ diagram of what happens to a blog post once you click ‘publish’. You’ll find it here.