Over at ReadWriteWeb, where I spend most of my time, we write mostly news and analysis but some “how-to” type posts. Below you’ll find one of my favorite how-to posts I’ve written lately, originally titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. I thought I’d repost it here in case any Marshallk.com readers missed it and because it’s relevant to my consulting work as well. Clients regularly hire me to advise or assist in the creation of strategic groups of contacts on various platforms. It’s super helpful. Check out this post and you’ll see why (and how).
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How cool is Portland, Oregon? So cool that you can put out a call for fans of tools like Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and other far-out feed manipulation services and get almost 40 people to show up! More than once!
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I’m always trying to figure out how to get more out of the tools I find online. I spend a lot of time figuring out new ways to discover good sources of information on a wide variety of topics; setting up systems for our writing staff at ReadWriteWeb and for consulting clients through my personal blog. Some of the things I’ve discovered lately I can’t disclose publicly, but here are three I can share. I hope you find them useful.
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Many readers here are interested in promoting their work online using new social media. Last month I put up a post on ReadWriteWeb titled Top Marketing Geeks Make Their Predictions for 2009. I thought I’d post it here as well for readers who may have missed it, along with some other resources.

Check out the 25 comments on the original post as well for some interesting discussion. Some readers were very critical and I’ve tried to offer some critical thoughts as well, but it’s clear that marking on the web is here to stay. Hopefully it will be based on a greater degree of authenticity, usefulness and innovation than marketing generally is known for.

For more personal thoughts on new media marketing, check out two of my old posts here Social Media for Marketing and Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion. Both are a touch out of date but should be a good source of some still-valuable resources and advice.

Speaking of resources, if you’re interested in new media marketing you may appreciate this OPML file of Chris Brogan’s favorite marketing bloggers to watch in 2009. It’s a special file of all their feeds filtered to deliver just their unusually popular posts (filtering performed by Postrank). You can download that file, then import it into your RSS reader and you’ll be kept super smart all year long. I’ll be keeping an eye on those feeds, myself.

If you’d like a short, concentrated injection of smarts along similar lines, check out my consulting services, just like these happy people have.

And now the blog post I promised…

Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation - perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we’ve embedded below, but we thought we’d pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.
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In September I wrote a blog post about reading RSS feeds for, if not at, your work. (”Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile“) One of the things I discovered in writing that post was the fantastic weekly carnival of medical blogs called the Grand Rounds. This wonderful series has been running for more than 4 years now and many of its participants put great care into their hosting efforts. When it’s their turn to play host the solicit, search for, organize and sometimes summarize an awesome selection of the best posts on medical blogs that week.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any way to subscribe to an RSS or email list of those posts - and I’ve looked really hard! Tonight I’m preparing for a presentation I’m giving tomorrow to a medical tech and civil liberites organization and I really wanted to make such a subscription available for them. So I bit the bullet and made it myself. It was not as easy as I’d like and is going to take a few minutes each week for me to maintain - so if any participants are here reading this and would like to take it over, I’ll show you below not just how I created the feed but how you can help too.

Read on for RSS and email subscription options and step by step instructions describing how this was done. I hope the first commenter from the medical blogging community who stops by will break my heart by showing me an existing RSS subscription option that I just haven’t found yet.
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I contributed a tutorial session to the BlogOn Expo Summer 2008 last week that I thought could be of interest to readers here. It’s titled “Tracking the Margins of Your Blogosphere and it’s all about a method I use to keep an eye on the most important news from sectors I am marginally interested in. The whole Expo should be worth some of your time, the last one was quite good.

I feel conflicted about the decision I have learned that the Expo has made to do a publicity deal with Izea/PayPerPost, who are scumbags. I can understand why the Expo would do so and I can understand why armies of beginning bloggers would work with Izea. However, I do not like the idea of advertisers paying for blog coverage and I do not believe them when they say disclosure is required. See image below, click for full size.

Why did I contribute to the BlogOnExpo? I didn’t know about the Izea partnership until after I already had and I’m not sure how big a deal it is. I do want to be clear though that I am in no way in support of Izea.

That said, I hope you like the content that I and a number of other bloggers contributed to the Expo.

I’m in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn’t really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer’s head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much - I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you’ll know what I mean after watching the video below.
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I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I’m glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I’ve extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself.

Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader.

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The most common topic I give training presentations on is the use of RSS for tracking issues important to various organizations. This has been the heart of what I’ve focused on since I first got involved in this industry, that hasn’t changed. My methodology has changed a lot over the years. It’s a happy day when I can add something new to my personal RSS strategy, and thus to the strategy I share with others.

Below is a series of screen shots illustrating the current state of my basic RSS work flow. There are lots of little details, feed discovery and creation techniques and other advanced steps that can be taken - but I’m often asked about the basics. So here they are. I hope you find this useful and feel free to pass it along to a friend. I’ll do my best to answer any questions in comments below. If you’d like a personalized research system like this set up and populated with the most useful feeds for your work, let me know. I’m also working with some other people on a giant post coming soon describing all the things I know how to do with a pile of RSS feeds - I have a consulting project that’s totally open ended so I thought I’d make a list.

Note that I made this post almost entirely with the application ScreenSteps. It was easy and fun, I wanted to try it and it didn’t take too long for me to think of a good topic to try it on.
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I’m excited to unveil my latest consulting project, a fairly extensive RSS-based microsite put together with Sun Microsystems for next week’s JavaOne conference. It’s called BlogCentral. Turns out today is international RSS Awareness Day! This might have been a better fit for Enterprise RSS Awareness Day last week, but that’s ok.

I don’t often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler - so don’t be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It’s like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what’s being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

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