Tools and techniques to scour the Web for content and news, track competitors, and monitor social buzz, industry blogs and company Websites.

This guide gives content and Web editors a strategic advantage with:

• tools and techniques for targeting a specific niche
• ways to efficiently identify breaking stories
• secrets for discovering essential information before competitors do
• methods for finding interesting and compelling content that can be reported on, featured or aggregated on their Websites
  

The information dashboard: An editor’s best friend

Typically, most content editors have a handful of blogs and sources that they scan on a daily basis, but going to each site can be time consuming. Creating a dashboard that conveniently aggregates all relevant blogs, websites, social media sites, company sites and that also performs custom searches on important industry leaders, athletes, events, companies and competitors is a very powerful and efficient way to monitor everything relevant in your niche and can create a major competitive edge.

There are many ways you can create an information dashboard, but Google Reader and iGoogle are the best places to start. Both collect RSS feeds from all the blogs, Websites

What is RSS? – “RSS in Plain English.”

Adding sites to your dashboard - Now that you’ve created your dashboard, you need to get information into it. First you’ll want to add the sites you’re currently following. Look for and click on the RSS or XML text/icon on a site. When clicking on the RSS link, each browser will handle it differently, but the ultimate goal is to add that RSS link to your Google Reader. If your browser doesn’t ask you to add to Google Reader, copy the RSS URL (example: feed://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn.rss) and paste it into your Google Reader.

Example of adding an RSS feed to Google Reader

Site doesn’t have RSS feed? - If the site you’re interested in doesn’t have an RSS feed or RSS icon, feedwhip.com or page2rss.com services can create an RSS feed to add to Google Reader.

Folders – Keeping it organized

Google Reader allows you to create folders, so you’ll be able to designate which folder you drop each new feed into and keep your information organized.

There are many different ways you may want to organize your content, but to start, set up at least two new folders. Label one folder “Daily” – this one is for your top 10 to 20 sources of content… those that have the most relevant content in your industry or niche.

Label the second folder “Archive.” This contains all of the other blogs, RSS feeds and content that you want to monitor. Make sure to assign each blog and RSS feed to one of these two folders. And remember, you can always add to and change these designations as your list evolves.

Create a Folder by clicking “Manage subscriptions »” (lower left hand corner) and selecting “New folder...” from drop-down

Strategic tools for finding interesting content

Now you’ll want to uncover additional blogs, Websites and social media sites that are specifically relevant or interesting. The challenge is to find and follow enough sites to avoid missing something important, yet follow a small enough number so as not to get overwhelmed. Here are some tools to really make you appear all seeing and all knowing.

• Google News Alerts: Google News Alerts will search all news media and AP articles. Have results sent to you via RSS instead of in email. Create multiple alerts and put popular keywords alerts in your daily folder and all others should be put in the archive folder.
• Alltop: A Website that aggregates top blog posts, organized by topic. Just find your topic, and start exploring new sites. If you find a great site, add the RSS feed to Google Reader.
• Google Blog Search: Use Google Blog Search to capture the conversations happening in the blogosphere. If Google Blog Search yields too many splog results (spam blogs automatically generated by keyword searches), try using Twingly (http://www.twingly.com/), Icerocket (http://icerocket.com/), or Yacktrack (http://yacktrack.com/) as alternative blog search engines. They seem to be more spam free

Monitor the Social Buzz

An entirely new source of information—so new, in fact, that most editors haven’t even realized it yet—is content and conversation from social networks. Much of it will be noise and not applicable, but once you learn to watch for patterns, social buzz can tip you off to controversy about your brand, an industry manufacturer or your competitors’ sites. Post articles about what people are talking about, what’s hot, or controversial. The discussion and buzz become the story.

Discussion boards: use Boardtracker (http://boardtracker.com/) or Omgili (http://www.omgili.com/) to conduct a search of topic-specific conversations across several different forums. After searching, subscribe to the results via RSS. You’ll likely want to put the resulting feeds in the archive folder.

Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipe Searches are powerful cloud applications that can search multiple sites for the keywords that are relevant to you, and post the results to your Google Reader. Searching can take a minute or two, but once the results are displayed, click the button to add the keyword search to your Google Reader.

• Social Media Firehose: This tool creates one RSS feed that aggregates results from Flickr, Digg, YouTube, FriendFeed and other social media sites.
• Latest Blog Mentions Pipe: This is another Yahoo Pipe that will aggregate brand references across several major blog search engines, including Technorati, Icerocket and Google Blog Search.

Twitter Search: Twitter is a social network where people chat about what’s hot around the Web (among other things). Monitoring its search function can give you a good idea of what’s happening around a given keyword. Just type in your search term (industry buzzwords, your brand name, or your competitors), conduct the search (making sure to limit your language parameters as appropriate), and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the results. Place the keyword results in your daily folder and archive the other searches.

Set up a spy network for pages like press releases, company info pages and employment sections – Many company sites will have pages that aren’t frequently updated, but you’ll be interested in knowing when and what they update. This can tip you off to a new hiring position (the implications can mean they’re firing someone or opening a new department), early knowledge of a press release or RFP announcement. Followthatpage.com and siteupdatenotification.com/watch will track sites, identify pages and content that has changed and give that information to you via RSS feed that you can include in your Google Reader.

Translate Foreign Sites - You may find interesting or related sites in another language or want to follow content in another part of the word. Get the RSS feed from the site and run it through Mloovi.com. This will create an English translated RSS feed to put into Google Reader.