How I Filter The Noise, Beth Harte

by Jason

July 14, 2009

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.

How We Filter 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.

SERIES How I Filter the Noise – Jason Keath, Taylor Davidson, Beth Harte, Hermione Way, Wayne Sutton