This is a tip or a technique I use everyday to monitor keywords about me and my clients. There are tools which do actual sentiment analysis and all kinds of other listening, but I just want to be reminded to read the conversations.
I also like to keep my inbox small. So I trick myself and have content by keywords delivered to my inbox, that way I’m forced to read it or make a conscious effort to ignore it. Not signing into a listening application can cause problems… unless it delivers emails of conversations.
This technique will focus on listening to twitter, however there are plenty of RSS feeds out there to use this method of “subscribing”
Gathering your RSS Feed
Simply head over to twitter search and type in a query, I’ll use “elephants” as mine… however I recommend you visit the Advanced Search page to develop a better query like “elephants -peanuts -from:Elleph” This will give you this page as a result http://twitter.com/search?q=elephants (or http://twitter.com/search?q=elephants+-peanuts+-from:Elleph) And in reality you can use these URLs in most RSS to Email tools, however I recommend going one step further and locating the actual RSS feed.
In the Twitter Search Results page you should see a link saying “Feed for this query” (as seen in the image below) right click on this link and choose copy link address or link URL. This is the actual RSS feed url that we’ll use in the next step.
Finding an RSS to Email tool
There are a few options, and some have come and gone over the years, so I’ll recommend two searches, and two currently functioning tools. First off, searches:
One of the current tools I use shows up in spot number one for both of those searches… Feed my Inbox. The next sections will explain what to do with each of these tools
Feed My Inbox
Arguably the best tool out there for taking an RSS feed and dumping the results to email, Feed my Inbox makes it quite simple, when you arrive it asks for a feed url (which we got from step one) and your email address, that’s all it needs to start emailing you the tweets you care about. (or blog postings youtube videos etc). You can also login to customize more settings, but the basics are here for you.
Notify.me
Taking the RSS to inbox one step further Notify.me allows you to have it send an SMS, IM or Email. Which is very handy for the more important keywords you want to pay attention to. Once signed in you can turn on and off notifications with a simple click and add feeds by pasting the URL (from above) to add new feeds.
Simple
These are two tools, and one technique that I use on a daily basis to keep me informed of conversations around my keywords… this is how I can appear to be online all day long while actually enjoying a life offline.
Remember, Automate the simple stuff, do the conversations and relationship manually.