How do you stay up-to-date? Ask Big Brother

Besides hiring the NSA to monitor mentions of your Non Profit how do you stay up to date? That is the question the fine folks at Net Squared are asking this month.

Blog posts, news articles, videos, tweets, photo and more are out there everyday about your org. So how do you monitor them? Here at the American Cancer Society High Plains we use a great iGoogle Dashboard (we got the idea from HSUS) that is modded up with all kinds of RSS feeds. For instance we did a twitter search on American Cancer Soicety. When you do this you get the RSS feed of the search. Then we add that as widget in iGoogle.  We then did a news search on google news. Grabbed the RSS feed and added that as awidget, etc.  We have three tabs: Main, Friends and Competitors and Relay For Life. This helps us keep track of a ton of info.

For the searches we use:

Google News
Google Blog Alerts to our Gmail
DIGG Rss searches
Forum Searches
Twitter Searches on a ton of keywords
BlogPulse Searches
Flickr Keyword Searches
and many more

Hope that helps!

Social Media Dashboard

Social Media Dashboard

4 comments

  1. Great suggestions here. Incorporating a 360 view of the tools available to monitor social media is a great way to stay abreast. Using igoogle is a great a low barrier to entry form of monitoring. Thanks for the hindsight!

  2. It helps a lot! Might become a “must read” for the NPOs we work with to grow mission-driven revenue.

    It’ss a fantastic post as it’s action-oriented and builds skills by recommending specific steps/tactics for doing it right. Very reminiscent of Chris Brogan’s (@chrisbrogan, http://www.chrisbrogan.com) post on “How to grow bigger ears in 10 minutes.” If you haven’t read that, please do, at http://www.chrisbrogan.com/grow-bigger-ears-in-10-minutes/

    Thanks for sharing!

    John

  3. I also stole the idea from Carie (is it stealing if she tells everyone about it?) and it’s a good one.

    We looked into Radian6 and probably soon we’ll have the ability to monitor with a Vocus upgrade from our PR department. Seeing a breakdown graph of the mentions of a particular term at 3pm on Tuesday is interesting, but for most orgs it’s just too much.

    For now I’ll be sticking with my iGoogle pimped out dashboard.

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