Monday, June 8, 2009

The Need for Feed: RSS & Twitter, Why They May be Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

The challenge with all things social media is keeping them up-to-date. Blogs can be a serious drain as they beg for content like Audrey in 'Little Shop of Horrors.' If you are using Twitter to communicate with your network and push relevant content, you may be experiencing the same thing. Even keeping up with 140 character posts can be a grind.

Recently, I've started experimenting with pushing some of the content that I feel is most relevant to the people I interact with as well as the public at large. It's been fun to watch the reactions and the results.

http://www.twitter.com/topcrmbloggers is a feed I set up that aggregates what I consider to be the best CRM Bloggers out there. You'll note that I have 33 followers in just a week without even trying. The feed of this twitter handle in turn feeds one of our Netvibes pages. Entropy yes, but we are serving up content at different potential access points for different users.

I also set up a fun feed of Odd News which I love to read while on the bus. It started on @pulverman on Twitter and is now featured on @OddNewsNetwork. @pulverman will now be an aggregation of the top Marketing 2.0 blogs starting tomorrow as well as my shorter musings on the world of Marketing 2.0. From the same feed as OddNewsNetwork I select one post at random once a day and feed my personal Twitter feed, @bolobao. This in turn updates Facebook providing a bit of fun for friends to see and comment on.

On slow news days, I know that at least the feeds I've set up are keeping various sites up-to-date with interesting content.

These are early days in my feed experiments, but I imagine marketers everywhere are struggling with these same issues.

Like a good blog post, I think in the final analysis, what you chose to feed to your social marketing efforts like what you post on your blog will be judged on relevance. If it is relevant - aggregated feeds crafted with the love and personality you apply to a post - it will be appreciated.

I'll no doubt keep tuning my feeds to make them ever more relevant and interesting. I just sent my Yelp reviews to my personal Twitter (@bolobao) and our Delicious posts (www.delicious.com/OracleCRM) to our work Twitter account (@OracleCRM). Perhaps RSS and Twitter aren't quite as cozy at PB&J yet, but I would like to submit that we all have the need for feed, even newspapers, making this combo perhaps your own personal Associated Press.

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