I posted a recipe for a personalized Twitter feed back in the Summer of 2010. A lot of things have changed in that time and I thought it would be a great time to write an update. Let me start by saying that this recipe is for research purposes and NOT personal branding. I’ll bullet it out to keep it simple.
Twitter – Create a Twitter account and make sure the name is something that speaks to research. ‘cruces_research’, for example. The profile should be something friendly that lets others know you’ll be using this account for research and won’t be creating much content.
Twitter gives you access to the fire hose.
WeFollow – Go to WeFollow.com and search for the terms you’re most interested in. i.e. mobilemarkeing. Make sure that the ones recommended by the system have active accounts. I found some stale ones. I would also use Twitter’s Category browse/search. In fact you may want to start there.
Twitter’s Category browse/search and WeFollow, help you find which part of the fire hose you want to listen to.
TweetDeck – Download TweetDeck and install it on your laptop. You only need a Twitter account and don’t need to join to use the tool.
TweetDeck allows you to listen to the curated feed you created using Twitter and WeFollow, real-time. Turn it on, and watch the data stream in.
Flipboard - Download the smatphone app and/or the tablet app. Install it and add your Twitter account (and LinkedIn). If you’re not looking at real-time content, you can use Flipboard to review the posts/articles/videos (data) at the beginning/end of the day on your iPad or on the train on your iPhone.
Flipboard allows you to review the information that you’ve collected in an easy to read method.
Pocket – Go to getpocket.com and install the bookmarklet, and the app for any device you may be consuming content on. Your tablet and your smartphone (browser or Flipboard) should all have Pocket installed on it for the “read later” option.
Pocket allows you to save the posts/articles/videos (data) you find into one central repository in the cloud. Â It’s searchable, visual and ROCKS!
I use these elements together in the following way.
- When I’m on my laptop and am doing work that doesn’t require a lot of grey matter, I turn on TweetDeck and the content updates appear in the bottom right hand corner. When I see something that looks interesting, I click on the link and it opens a browser tab. If the content does prove to be interesting, I click the ‘+Pocket’ bookmarklet and it saves it to Pocket.
- When I’m using Flipboard on my iPad and I see something interesting, I select the ‘Read Later’ option and it saves it Pocket.
- When I see something poignant on my Safari mobile browser, I select the read later option and it push it to Pocket.
The point of all this is that no one has time to go and find the content (data) they need. If you tap in to the right part of the ecosystem and then configure it in such a way, your research becomes much easier and up-to-date. It’s also searchable and can be used to create marketing presentations (or any other type of presentation for that matter).
