How to constantly keep your ear to the ground & keep yourelf up to date on what people are saying online about you, your competitors and your industry in general.

There are two easy steps - 1. Get an RSS reader and 2. Subscribe to Technorati Searches.

If you know about RSS and RSS readers, but not about subscribing to Technorati search you can skip part one of this post and go directly to part two.

1. Get an RSS Reader.

The first thing you will need is an RSS reader. Blogs (and other types of websites) publish their content in two forms - the form you see when you use a browser, and an RSS feed. RSS is a stripped down version of the same content, RSS feeds do away with any visual styling and contain only the actual content.

Using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to RSS feeds. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the blogs you visit and your feed reader will grab the up to date content from each of those feeds regularly, ensuring that you can read all your favourite blogs in one place on your desktop.

There are a huge number of RSS readers available, many of them free. I use RSS Owl on my PC and find it reliable and easy to use. RSS Owl also have some Flash Demos to help you get to know their product.

Doing Google search for RSS Reader will bring back a range of readers if this one does not suit you. There are also online feed readers available (such as Google Reader), but I find it preferable to have a desktop application.

2. Subscribe to Technorati searches.

Once you have decided on a reader you can begin to listen out for what people are saying about your company or your industry, or even your competitors!

The easiest way to do this is to use Technorati’s search feeds. Technorati is a Blog search engine, and it is incredibly easy to use their service to keep yourself up to date with what is being said on millions of blogs worldwide.

Simply perform a search on Technorati, find the feed for the search results and subscribe your RSS reader to that feed. The RSS feed for your search results will update as new results become available, allowing you to keep up to date.

To begin with, do a search for your company name - at the top right of the results you should see a small orange icon and the word ’subscribe’. This is the link to the RSS feed for your search. Add this RSS feed to your reader and you will now be able to see when someone mentions your company on a blog.

You should also have a think about other industry related terms to search for - for example if your are running a cafe you might subscribe to searches for ‘coffee’, ‘fair trade coffee’, ’starbucks’, ‘where to go in [insert area]‘, ‘flavoured cofee’ etc etc.

You will notice in the Technorati search bar there is a link an ‘advanced search’ - you can use this feature to search for exact phrases, or search only in blogs about a certain subject.

Technorati is a very popular blog search engine and it indexes millions of blogs, but not necessarrily all of them. Now that you are familiar with the process you could explore how to do the same with Google Blog Search, IceRocket and Feedster.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 7:37 am and is filed under General Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.