(A Case Study in Six Parts)
- RSS (The Grunt Work)
- RSS for Twitter
- RSS for SEO
- RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
- Share
- Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation
PREFACE
To preface this article, only possible after I’ve written most of it, it is important to note that it took me longer to write this description and assessment than it did to actually implement the social media engagement. I say this because although all the tools I use are free, the hours that we spend at Penn State are more valuable then ever. Things that take a lot of time are simply not going to fly in this current climate.
This is online guerrilla marketing.
But also, the documentation and assessment process can sometime become burdensome and is often forgotten to be added to the calculations. Perhaps much like us time-tracking our analysis of all of our time-tracking. It gets weird in there, and eventually becomes counterproductive.
PART 1 – RSS GOALS
My initial goal was to simply create an RSS feed of the daily activity of mudcat.org for my own use.
The draw of mudcat.org is the discussion forum where we talk about folk songs, singer/songwriters, musical instruments, and life as how it relates to tradition and song. We average about 800 new messages per day. About 5% of the messages are on new topics and the rest are from existing topics that now exceed 85,000 in number.
I wanted to get a list of topics in my reader and my email every morning as simply a quick way to keep an eye on things. With a Web site in which the vast majority of content comes from it’s users (much like Facebook Groups), our job becomes to maintain a certain order. I’m always seeking new tools in which to care and cultivate the community.
Step one was to program an RSS feed of the active topics of our forum. Essentially taking the same code that makes the forum work but reformatting the output to comply with RSS format. I am a very average beg-borrow-and-steal kind of programmer and it took me a couple of hours to figure it out and get to work, so I think damn near any of us could do it.
This is a popular RSS icon. RSS feeds are everywhere these days. The YouTube videos that you upload, your Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, Google Alerts, your Blog posts and even your Amazon WishList and NetFlix rentals already have the RSS part done for you. There is also infrastructure on much of the Penn State and Outreach content on the Web and Social Networks that are already set up for this.
RSS was created to improve the experience of change to the Web. RSS serves to add a chronology to a living, changing Web site, organizes it, gives the user the choice of how it is delivered, and delivers it. It remains a powerful resource, though not widely used in the mainstream demographic.
These techniques simply deliver the same RSS goodness to more popular mechanisms (Twitter, Email, Facebook).
No two RSS feed links look the same. Here are some of mine: http://digg.com/users/MaxSpiegel/history.rss OR http://rss.netflix.com/TrackingRSS?id=P6352635209584078500019341428670625 OR http://maxspiegel.posterous.com/rss.xml OR http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/18513524.rss
And my raw mudcat RSS feed looks like: http://mudcat.org/threads-rss-www.cfm If you click on that and see the data, it might be hard to understand how that could be useful in any way.
Once you have a feed, a service like Google’s Feedburner can format and manage the distribution and analytics of that feed. Your data, or content, is now portable. It can be formatted into an email newsletter, it can be fed to other sites or blogs, shared on social networking sites or my favorite part, fed directly into Google and Yahoo search engine databases dramatically reducing the time it takes my 800 new daily messages to get into their search results.
Doesn’t this sound like fun?
An upcoming post will touch upon aggregation. Combining various RSS feeds into one comes in handy sometimes. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool for this process. Again, a free tool that a laymen like me can navigate and make useful in a reasonable amount of time. AgSci, as an example, uses Yahoo Pipes to combine five different faculty members’ blogs into one feed.
Why do they do this and what do they do with it? Stay tuned for my next installment… [Part II]
[For giggles, I aggregated everything I could find about me. My blogs, twitter, facebook, netflix, youtube, digg, delicious, vimeo, redux, even all the songs I listen to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MaxSuperFeed.]
Another example is making an RSS feed out of a Twitter search. Here is an RSS Feed of all tweets within 15 miles of State College Raw and Burned. A nice way to keep an eye on what’s happing in our geographic area.
