Technology
How I Filter The Noise, Beth Harte
Beth Harte is a marketer, blogger, speaker, communicator, thinker, connector (people & dots), adjunct professor and Community Manager for MarketingProfs. Beth’s blog, The Harte of Marketing is featured in AdAge’s Power 150. Beth also blogs for MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.
The more you engage in social media, the more you realize that there are a lot of folks out there talking just to talk and that there are some folks that aren’t as well known, but are absolutely brilliant. Of course, brilliant is a highly subjective term. For me brilliance isn’t someone who’s like Einstein. For me a brilliant person is the one who has a unique voice, isn’t a lemming, questions the status quo, always tries to spark a conversation (no matter how small or large) with an insightful post, tweet or comment, and someone I learn something new or different from.
So, how do I cut through the clutter to find these brilliant people?
Tweetdeck
When dealing with Twitter, I like to use Tweetdeck because it allows me to create groups…lots of groups! I create groups of friends, people who tweet on certain topics, keywords – you name it!
The more I can slice and dice (I am a marketer, after all), the more I can find those brilliant people and nuggets of information that they might be sharing.
BackType
BackType is a cool site that allows you to keep track of your comments, people who have commented about you and, more importantly, the comments that people you follow leave for others. BackType also allows you to search on keywords, again, very helpful to a marketer. The best part about BackType is I can see where the people I follow leave comments, which helps me to find blogs or smart folks that I may not have known about.
Google Reader
I’d be lost without my Google Reader. Every time I find a new blog using the tools above, I add it to my Google Reader. You can imagine that over time, I have a TON of blogs bookmarked. Every morning, I change the reader to the “All Items” view and I scroll down all the posts, not by blogger…but by date. Those with the best or intriguing titles win my attention. Again, I also look for posts on topics, people’s names, and information I might not have had access to previously.
These tools might seem basic, and perhaps not so cool, but for a marketer, they relieve a lot of the time burden that social media places on us.
How I Filter The Noise, Taylor Davidson
Guest blog post by Taylor Davidson (@tdavidson); innovation, photography, travel and entrepreneurship, in some continually shifting combination and order.
Each one of us makes a very personal decision about how to find, filter and understand information to help us live our lives and succeed in our careers. Our goals, interests and personal styles shape what, why and how we sift through the content and context created by the maze of interactions on the web. Instead of focusing on the strategies and tactics that I use to filter the web, consider my own methods and tools as just the best way that I know how, right now, to achieve what I want; like all of us, I’m always looking for ideas and ways to improve.
Considerations and Creating a General Philosophy
Before you think about tools, think about you and what you want to achieve: how much time do you have to devote to consuming information? How much noise is “too much” for you? What methods have you tried, for how long, and what has been successful for you? What networks do you use to connect to people and information? What do you want to do with the information, insights and (hopefully) knowledge that passes through your filters? For example, do you want to find new sources of information, cut out repetitive sources, reduce the time you spend online, spend more time creating, automate your filters, focus on breaking news or in-depth, timeless analysis?
Think about these questions to create your own strategies and goals, but I’ll start with outlining my general philosophy:
- I devote an hour or two a day to reading news and in-depth analysis, and I like following a range of topics and a wide range of people.
- I’m willing to dig through a fair amount of noise to find great signals.
- I try to use algorithms and people to curate my news; I use a mix of searches and popularity-ranking algorithms to find information, but I depend on people to filter content and add their own analysis and point of view.
- I do not read newspapers or major primary news sources; again, I depend on interesting people to find what I should read.
- I feel no need to read everything that pops through my filters; if it’s important enough, it will find me again eventually.
- I’m not terribly concerned with keeping up with the real-time web; it often takes a bit of time to truly process new information and understand the second-order impacts.
- I love to engage bloggers and comment on posts in order to learn, refine my thoughts, and dig deeper into topics with knowledgeable people.
- I want to structure and pass on the information that I find in a way that goes beyond just passing along information but adds something to the conversation, whether it’s an insight, a connection between bits of information or people, or simple something too interesting not to share with my friends.
Given the philosophy, how do I do it?
Using Feeds to Follow People: Blogs, Backtype, Twitter
Blogs continue to be the focus of my filtering efforts due to my focus on long-form content, but as more and more content and interactions have shifted to micro-interactions I find myself needing to use more platforms to find information, links and people.
I use Backtype to create RSS feeds of searches through comments for terms and topics of interest, but I truly enjoy following the comment streams (using RSS feeds) from individuals as a way to see what is truly important to them.
I use Twitter to find links to information, but I don’t use any special tools or tactics other than dipping into the stream from time to time. I use feeds from Twitter search to follow certain keywords, but I also follow @ replies to certain people to see who is talking to them or sharing information with them.
Organizing the Feeds: Google Reader and PostRank
I know many people have sworn off RSS, but I continue to use RSS and RSS readers (my personal choice: Google Reader) as a way to consolidate the streams of information. I use RSS to bring to me a mix of blogs, searches and Google Alerts to follow the web, and I use categories in Google Reader to attempt to structure the information . I have a “best” category to follow the sources I find to be consistently interesting and a mixture of other categories organized into different topics or goals. This is far from static: I add and remove feeds, blogs, categories constantly to find new sources of information and new ways to organize.
Additionally I use PostRank and AideRSS’s Google Reader Firefox extension to integrate PostRank with Google Reader in an attempt to figure out which posts are “can’t-miss”; but given that I am open to sifting through a lot of noise and that I depend on many people that do not have a huge following, I find Postrank isn’t the best fit for my own filtering strategies. I’ve tested BlogRollr and Filtrbox to find and filter information, but I’m always on the lookout for new algorithms and methods for adding more “relevance” and context to my filtering tactics.
Yes, that’s a simple set of tools, somewhat inefficient and ripe for over-consumption, but the benefits from depending on loose networks and “structuring serendipity” to introduce me to great concepts, insights and people is simply too great to give up … yet.
How I Filter The Noise, Jason Keath
The vast amounts of information available online for any subject can get overwhelming quickly. As a self confessed news junkie, I dive in every day and devour massive amounts of news. Still, it becomes daunting.
We all cobble together our own method of sorting and filtering through the noise.
The “How I Filter The Noise” guest blog post series will is meant to be an insight with a few examples of how people find their way through such a wild web of content. Hopefully we can all learn a little bit. Thanks to the half dozen guest bloggers that will be joining me in sharing their filter strategies over the next week or two. Look for their posts soon.
I Stopped Tracking EVERYTHING
My Google Reader, a key to almost all filtering strategies, use to be full of Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and several other massive tech and social media blogs. Each of these blogs ramp up a dozen or two posts a day. At one point I was trying to skim through hundreds of blog posts and news articles each day. Trying to take in this amount of information was impossible. All I ended up doing is making it more difficult to find the news I cared the most about.
My middle ground was only subscribing to about 6 of the 30-40 bloggers that write for these sites – The ones who I thought touched on the most relevant information for me. This was a large improvement but still did not give me the relevance I was seeking.
I Steal My Reading List from Friends
Within Google Reader, you subscribe to articles that your friends share, as opposed to standard RSS feeds. I have been using this feature more and more recently and find it does wonders for screening quality content. I am more or less stealing the reading lists of my friends.
Not all my friends use this feature and not all of the ones that do share things I care about. But I have focused on about a dozen folks who share great stuff almost daily, but not so much content that it overwhelms me.
I Focus With A Second Twitter Account
Yes I follow somewhere near 30 thousand people on Twitter, and no I do not listen to all of them. I, of course, filter.
My main filter on Twitter is a second personal Twitter account where I follow about 150 people.
The second Twitter account is what I use to listen to the people I most care about. It is comprised of designers, social media thought leaders, friends, and people in my home town of Charlotte. It is my go to pulse for the internet. I use Tweetie on the iPhone and Tweetdeck on my desktop to easily listen from this second account, while still being able to reply from my main, public Twitter account, @jakrose.
I Find The Highlights
For technology I use Techmeme. They rarely miss a big tech story and usually have it hours or days before any other news outlet. Tweetmeme is fast becoming a good solution for this too. For politics I browse Politico. For any other subject I either check Digg‘s specific categories or Twitter Search.
That is it. Find valuable friends on Google Reader. Use a focused second Twitter account. And find a way to catch the highlights.
New ‘Quirky’ is Crowdsourcing on Crack
Kluster is a cool crowdsourcing community that launched at TED 2 years ago and fosters community collaboration on a unique level. Members submitted problems, suggested solutions, and voted to guide the creation of all kinds of products.
It was wide open, with little direction, creating everything from copywriting to website design to industrial design and more. Since then kluster has tried to focus on more niche collaboration communities and today their newest effort, quirky, went live.
Quirky is focused on industrial and product design, and takes design collaboration to a new level. Creating new products, designing that next cool gadget, is how kluster started. Quirky builds on that idea, the thought that a group of creative people can combine unique ideas to solve simple problems, and profit from them together.
Got some undervalued design skills? Constantly writing down ideas for inventions or new products? Give quirky a go and share your ideas with the world.
Their first product, the slingback, is already for sale. They describe it as the first universal cord retractor. I personally could use a half dozen of these. If industrial designers and idea folk embrace the concept of this community, the possibibillities seem very cool for quirky.
Kluster also brought us the copywriter’s playground that is NameThis.com, another favorite collaboration community.
I dig quirky because it brings an idea platform to the masses, a true outlet. Anyone can take an idea that may better the world, or maybe just improve the modern mousetrap, and share it with the world. Our collective intelligence gets a little more collective with sites like this.
And just imagine what they can do if they team up with charities, helping to design that next great mwater purifyer or mosquito deterent.
Can Twitter Stop the New User Bleeding?
Nielsen reported last week that the retention rate of new Twitter users was pretty bloody, with only 30-40% of new users returning a month after joining.
More than 60% of US Twitter users fail to return the following month. Twitter’s retention rate is about 40%. For most of the past year, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30% retention.
Many have pointed out these numbers do not take into account third party clients like Tweetdeck. For the sake of this post I am assuming that no matter the percentages, Twitter needs to improve the experience for new users and retain more of them. The fact that so many new users do not “get it” right away is not surprising (@’s and #’s be damned).
Twitter is not doing much to improve that intake process.
Weak Suggested Users
Twitter’s only big push to improve these numbers has been the suggested users list they started 2 months ago. The suggested users, in its current state, provide little value to a new user. Twitter defines these suggested users as:
a bit like your local book store’s staff picks. (We) developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out
Where is the relevance to me personally?
Much of the value of Twitter comes from the personalization, shaping the information to be as relevant to our personal needs as possible. Random popular users are more novelty.
Below are some of my suggestions for Twitter.
Higher Relevance
- Location - Suggest users within a certain distance and create better location search options
- Industry - Allow users to define their industry with keywords, suggest users accordingly
- Interests - Mine a new user’s bio and ongoing tweets, suggest users accordingly
Show me people connected to me in these ways and I have something to talk about with them right away. I also have an immediate group of highly relevant tour guides and ambassadors to teach me how the game is played.
Ongoing Suggested Users
Keep these suggestions coming. List them in the sidebar or send an email or anything that gives suggested users a higher profile and does not depend upon new users discovering it on their own. I may miss it at signup. I may give you more information that improves the process.
A Real User’s Guide
I remember being pretty confused by Twitter when I first signed up. The basics are simple: type message and send. The breadth of the service, however, is quite complex. A couple short and simple video demos would do wonders for explaining to new users the potential the service holds.
If I see Twitter me this and Twitter me that on CNN and my local radio station, I might go sign up, but the people are what makes me stay. Finding people that provide me with information, entertainment, and relationships creates user investment. Once Twitter learns how to quickly provide that value to new users, their retention rate will rise accordingly.
None of It Really Matters
I would like to see Twitter make their intake process a little more user friendly, but at the end of the day, they don’t need to. I am sure their investors are eager to see retention rates rise, but Twitter already has insiders from tech, media, and Hollywood signed up and passionate about their product.
Twitter is a different type of service and can easily fail to appeal to the masses in the same way as Facebook, Myspace, or even LinkedIn. The important fact remains that Twitter has a rabid and influential customer base in their corner, and that is very valuable.
