The importance of “listening” on the web

Photo by Theory at www.flickr.com/photos/theory

[Cross posted from the Third Sector Foresight website and updated from a previous post on this blog].

For many organisations, making the best use of the most basic ICT can be a struggle, let alone starting to think about how they might use social media tools.  The reality is that with more and more information and discussions online, those that don’t engage are likely to miss out.

Government departments are already posting their new policies and initiatives online, local CVS are keeping their websites up to date with the latest funding opportunities and people are discussing the work that you do online.

Can you afford to not receive this information?  Should you be letting these conversations happen without your input?  Using information in this way is only going to increase so getting to grips with it is vital.

Getting started with social media needn’t be a big step, in fact organisations should probably start small until they get the hang of it.  Even if you’re not confident in (or even interested in) setting up a blog or joining a social networking site there is a mass of information out there that could help you to do your job more effectively.

You can broadly categorise five stages of engaging with social media, each subsequent step requiring more time per week to maintain:

• Listening
• Participating
• Generating a buzz
• Sharing content
• Building communities

Getting started with listening is easy, the initial steps are:

Set up an RSS feed reader account

The key tool behind listening is RSS, sending any new web based information straight to you, saving you time from both searching for information and only seeing what’s relevant.  To use RSS you’ll need to set up a feed reader, either something web based like Bloglines or if you use an internet browser like IE7 or Firefox, it’s already built in.

Sign up to RSS news feeds

The square orange RSS logo indicates that a website it set up to enable RSS feeds.  You might choose to get started with some key news sites like BBC, Communities and Local Government, NCVO or Third Sector Foresight.  In no time at all you will identify other sites you want to follow and you simply add them.

 

Read blogs

Blogs are free and easy to set up and allow people to talk about what they’re interested in.  If people are using blogs to talk about your area, your field of work or even your organisation, don’t you want to know about it?

The easiest way to find blogs is to start with one and then see who they link to.  If you want somewhere to start then why not try NCVO’s Public Service Delivery Network blog.

You can also search for blogs specifically within Google.

Set up key word searches

Searching for keywords can often throw up useful information on the internet, especially if your keyword is fairly unique (such as “NCVO” or “foresight”).

You can save a Google blog search to continually look for your keyword and email you with the result.

Twitter is increasingly hosting conversations that we should be listening to, you can set up your own Twitter search and even feed the results into your RSS feed reader.

Do all of these at once!

A really useful comment from Dave Briggs below pointed out the Addict-o-matic website which does a lot of this “listening” all at once.

Go to http://addictomatic.com/ and put in your keyword, it might be your organisation’s name or something about the work you do … and see the results come in.

Further information

There are loads more excellent resources to help you listen on the web and I’ve saved them at http://delicious.com/ICT_Hub/listening.  You might also want to download a copy of the “How to use new media” guide.

My RSS is working!

Woo hoo! In a feeling vaguely similar to seeing the Reds beat Chelsea away at Stamford Bridge … my RSS feeds work!  My solitary updated posting was from Paul Webster, it was a shame it featured flames and destruction but you need to take what you get! (only kidding Paul – thanks for the mention)

I need to get in to the swing of reading more blogs now, not just because I have to but because I want to find out what everyone else is talking about.  It’s the nosey streak in me.

One great set of blogs, and an example of a VCO putting new media to good use is the Mindbloggling site, which featured in the Media Trust new media case studies booklet.  The site was set up by the Media Action Group for Mental Health and gives people a safe space to talk about their experiences of mental health, whether their own or from within their family and friends.  One example of these blog is a distorted view? http://mb1005.blogspot.com/, the latest posts lets the readers know ..

“First of all I want to thank all of you who commented on my last blog with your supportive responses it means alot!”

I’m looking forward to finding out lots of other ways organisations are using new media, and letting everyone else know about them at the conferences.

Now I’ll always be in touch

I think I’ve just subscribed to RSS feeds for some of the blogs listed on the right.  It’s all coming together now.

The idea behind RSS is that you don’t need to keep going to your favourite sites every day to see what’s new, the new stuff gets sent straight to you.  In the words of Paul Daniels .. Magic!  I’ve set up an RSS feed on Bloglines, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow, or the next time someone posts, to find out if I’ve set it up OK.  As I’m finding with all these tools, it wasn’t the easiest thing to do, after putting in the URL (web address) of the blog I wanted to subscribe to, often a number of options would appear and without much explanation on the site, I clicked on the one that looked most probable.  Let’s see how it goes.

You know it’s hard to think about RSS feeds when the sun is shining outside and the ducks are quacking.

Talking of Paul Daniels I’ve just taken a look at his site sadly to get a link for this and you can download a video podcast of him teaching magic tricks, technology rocks!