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6 Ways To Get Organized And Centralized With Social Media

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Get organized and centralized now using Social Media.

One of the easiest and best ways to get organized is in managing and manipulating your News Reader to get the most out of it. My personal News Readers of choice is Google Reader (but you can get organized with whichever one you’re most comfortable with).

Here are 6 ways to use a Reader to get more organized and centralized with Social Media:

  1. Create folders. While many people love the "river of news" and how the content just flows into the Reader as it is published, Google Reader allows you to create folders. It’s shocking to see how few people use this to get organized. One trick is to create a *TOP folder which should consist of your "must-read" Blogs and news sources. The "*" will bring this list – alphabetically – to the top. You can organize the rest of your folders by industry, specific types of people, geography, etc…
  2. Star, share or read later. Starring content is a great way to get inspiration for Blog posts, Podcast episodes or even fodder for Twitter and/or Facebook, but sharing the content is a great way to allow people to publicly see what you have to be the most relevant and important content (it’s also much more social). Instapaper is another great tool which allows you to read content later in a very simple way (and it has an amazing iPhone app that compliments the experience). Having the content flow in is one thing, actually diving into it and reading it is another. Having a good personal strategy around aggregating and reading content is critical to being more efficient.
  3. Pull your Alerts into your reader. If you’re not using Google Alerts, you’re probably missing a ton of great content. Alerts don’t have to come via email only. Google Alerts now enables you to create a feed for the alert. By subscribing to that news alert in your Reader, you can actually centralize more and more of your content. Think of your Reader as your personal NORAD system.
  4. Create more dynamic alerts. Don’t just stick to your brand names, products, services and key management people. Start tracking your competitors, their key terms, the key industry leaders and even cast the net wider by looking at more generic industry terms, the cities you serve and beyond.
  5. Subscribe to those who inspire you. Whether it’s in Delicious or through someone’s Google Profile, more and more people are sharing their content publicly. Most platforms offer the ability to subscribe to that individual’s feed of the content they’re publicly sharing. You can pull that feed into your own Reader and get a peak into the mind’s eye of the people you respect and follow (plus, the serendipity of following their content may help you discover newer sources of information and inspiration).
  6. Pull your Twitter Search into your reader. While platforms like TweetDeck are great at creating a holistic view of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter Search also enables you to create a feed based on a search query. Much in the same way that Google Alerts works, you can now grab these specific Twitter Search feeds and pull them into your Reader, further consolidating and organizing your content while centralizing everything.

Any other cool tips and/or tricks in getting your Social Media organized and centralized?

17 comments

  1. I use iGoogle home page because I find it is more visual than the reader. Using it you basically program your own virtual newspaper. I have a News section, Design Section, Business Section, Digital Media section and more areas of my own interest. Plus a few distractions (much like the “funnies” section of the traditional newspaper) These include a couple of fun widgets and photo feeds. Lastly – the used furniture feed from my local Craig’s list – so I even have the classified section of the paper covered – only the specific section I am interested in.
    In each section I pull in traditional media plus bloggers I follow in that area. I have ONE landing place to visit each day – the articles I notice but dont have time to read I save using Instapaper.
    I show everyone I know and they love it. I wonder how many people use this?

  3. Nice post. And thank you for showing me I am in the truth 😎 Yes to gReader.
    As everything is RSS, I think you are right to centralize news in a reader.
    @Suzanne Compared to iGoogle, gReader allows you to see what’s unread or not.
    About the *, I used numbers (1,2,3) and even “sub numbers” (1.2) to sort the folders, til I discovered you could organize manually with drag&drop those folders.

  4. I love this topic and some great recommendations here that I haven’t really heard before however it seems like everything is being funneled to RSS, which is great but seems to create a monster pile of RSS feeds.
    You mention it in this post… but what is your (or anyone reading this) system for getting back to this information and beng able to read it?
    Do you spend x minutes a day at a certain time to go over your feeds and starred items? Do you simply do your best and get to it as you wait for planes, buses and trains?
    We live at an amazing time, where so much amazing information is free but I find it a bit hard to get to all of it!

  5. I’ve been waiting for something like this to pop up in a blog (great minds think alike)
    This looks like a job for apple!
    cheers

  6. The “send to” function in Google Reader has/will definately make me a better contributor to social media communities.
    I love the fact that I can see an amazing blog post in my Google Reader and send it to a Twitter feed and it automatically puts in the tiny URL. In one pass I can now read a great article and tweet it. Amazing.
    I also love the fact that I can see a great non-business type article and send to my Facebook.
    If I had to go to another site to create the tiny URL or just simply have too many clicks to post to Twitter or Facebook I would not bother.

  7. Mitch, I agree: Google Reader is my reader of choice as well. That said, I do also like feedly which integrates really well with it and gives reader a bit more of a magazine feel. Also, it has the ability to randomly “shuffle” between different RSS feeds which is kind of neat too if I feel like surfing through my feeds. Regarding delicious, nothing beats the Mozilla plugin and toolbar for delicious, in my book, when it comes to tagging web pages, keeping them organized and seeing what others have tagged/bookmarked. Thanks for a great post. This has been on my mind (sounds like on minds of others too). Glad you addressed it!

  8. I second Feedly as well – it syncs both ways with Google Reader, and I find it creates a beautiful, well laid out presentation of your feeds. Great tip about using folders – until I did the same O had a hard time making sense of all the information. A great iPhone app is NewsRack which also syncs with Reader. Great tips as usual Mitch – thanks.

  12. Like the tips, each of which I’ve done over time to get organized just like you say. Two tips I’d add:
    Try Feedly via Firefox add-on. It’s another way to view Google Reader and its visually a much better way to digest your feeds.
    I’ve found it a benefit when wanting to keep up with people or brands via Twitter but not wanting them in my constant stream, to subscribe to them via RSS and drop them into a folder in Reader. This way I can go see at any moment what they’ve been tweeting without having to bog down my twitter stream.

  15. Wow…this is great! I’m just starting to enter the digital world…I know, but better late than never. Just finished Six Pixels of Separation…It’s a Brave New World!
    Thanks for the book Mitch and to everyone else here, all these terrific tips.
    I just purchased my IPhone a week ago! Big Learning Curve ahead..Thanks.

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