Tapping into the collective intelligence
I’ve been fortunate lately, learning the Art of RSS Mixology from Marshall Kirkpatrick, in one of his last extended consulting contracts before he begins writing for ReadWriteWeb full time. Marshall is an RSS and “market intelligence systems” (I like that phrase) guru who’s helping me figure out how to efficiently and completely monitor the social web - including forums, social networks and the blogosphere - for the Academic Network and one of their large pharmaceutical clients.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure…
Monitoring your brand’s online reputation is becoming more critical as social media use explodes. We’ve got quite a system now - of persistent RSS feeds (via Attensa), Yahoo!Pipes (for combining and filtering feeds), Dapper (for those sites without RSS feeds built in) - watching a whole bunch of social media and delivering results right to our client’s (you name it) inbox/private website/RSS reader, in real time.
Thinking differently…
The thing that I’ve found most interesting, though, in learning from him, is the way that Marshall intuitively taps into the collective intelligence as he works.
- He keeps his own RSS feeds automatically rolling in several areas on his machine, so during times he’s forced to wait or scan, he can also scan scrolling feeds:
- On his GMail account, the feed rolls along the top of his inbox - something might inspire him there…
- Twitter updates roll along the side of his workspace on his Mac - he’s gotten great story scoops there…
- He has special landing pages built into shortcuts to sites that he visits often:
- His delicious shortcut always goes to delicious/popular, so he will always see (and search) the most popular tagged sites first. You never know when a hotly tagged page will inspire or enlighten you!
- His Google Blog Search page opens to a search of his own name, so he can always know whether there’s a new post mentioning his name. (He’s always quick to comment that way… which is inspirational.)
I have a new set of shortcuts in my toolbar now. What can you do - by thinking just a little differently - to take advantage of the collective intelligence as you go through your day?
