As a business owner (or conscientious employee), you’re expected to stay on top of your industry. It gives you a competitive edge, keeps you in tune with trends, and helps you adapt proactively when the game changes. To stay informed, you attend trade shows, conferences and mixers, and keep in touch with your industry contacts. But this represents a sizeable time commitment – one you’re not always able to make.
Equally effective is market research. If you’re really lucky, you have a communications specialist monitoring the media for you. If you don’t, you probably read the news, subscribe to magazines and industry publications, and track various media sources when you have the time. Technology helps, since most publications and media outlets now offer their content online via podcasts, interactive websites and social media.
But digital content can get overwhelming. Say you want to read the daily headlines from CBC, BBC, CNN, the Globe, and the Times. You also want to check a few corporate blogs for updates, and track 4 or 5 Facebook fan pages that are actively pushing out announcements, news and events.
Monitoring all of this daily takes hours. Every site has a different layout and design, content can be interrupted by ads and popups, and some sites just don’t update daily. It’s inefficient, because it requires you to find the information. Let’s look at how technology can help the right information find you.
It’s… Really Simple
Most websites that regularly update their content also publish a feed where you can find the newest stuff. It’s called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and it’s tremendously useful. You’ve probably seen the little orange buttons everywhere. These feeds contain chronological lists of article headlines, brief descriptions of the articles, and links to stories on the original website. No ads, no popups, no clicking. Instead of wading through the 50 or so articles that news websites publish daily, the RSS feed lets you take a quick glance at the headlines, and only view the articles you find interesting. How do you use RSS? It’s a simple process, with a lot of options.
1. Choose a “feed reader”
A feed reader is either an app (application) you download or a web-based service you sign up for that handles your RSS subscriptions. If you have a PC a great, free product is FeedDemon. On a Mac, try NetNewsWire. For web-based services, NetVibes and Google Reader rule the roost. Your browser should also have a built-in RSS reader – e.g. Internet Explorer 7 and 8, or any version of Safari (for both PC and Mac).
2. Add your existing feeds
Your feed reader has an ‘Add feed’ button that takes you through the subscription process. Google Reader will even let you type in keywords (like ‘cnn’) and track down the appropriate feed for you. Did you know that every single Facebook fan page has an RSS feed? So does the magazine you’re reading right now. You’ll be surprised at how many websites you already visit that offer RSS.
3. Find more feeds
A quality feed is worth its weight in gold – and there are plenty out there. At Alltop.com you can run a keyword search and see the top feed-powered sites that match it. Also, Digg, Reddit and Delicious.com host feeds on a variety of topics, consisting of recommended content from thousands of real people. Once you find a feed that suits you, just enter its web address into your reader – you’re now a subscriber.
4. Sync, share, catalogue, digest
You can’t always read a full-text article the moment you find it. If it’s interesting though, you’ll want to save it for later, or share it with others. Luckily, there are tools for these occasions.
To keep your reading list in sync across laptops, desktops and smartphones, web services like Google Reader, Delicious, Read It Later and Instapaper are great. For a better mobile experience, Read It Later and Instapaper both have dedicated apps for your smartphone. These apps create text-only versions of the article you want to read – no awkward design, no ads, no weird formatting. They also make it easy to save and share articles to a variety of networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Delicious.
I typically scan headlines on my desktop, send interesting articles from there to Read It Later, and then read an article or two on my smartphone whenever I have some time to kill. If it’s a good article, I’ll post it to Twitter and Delicious right from my phone.
Entrepreneurs, small business owners (and those that work with them) tend to be very busy people. Nobody has the time to spend 8-10 hours a week reading news. But get a feed reader, and that 8-10 hours a week becomes 8-10 minutes a day. How’s that for time management?
Submitted by Ari Najarian, Torusoft Inc., www.torusoft.ca
You can reach Ari at: ari@torusoft.com or 902-463-9347
