In our post, "Monitoring Social Networks For Economic Development", we discussed the importance of tracking content on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Although there are tools such as Radian6, a simple tool like Google Reader can aid competitive intelligence researchers.
Here's how:
As a start up company that is interested in competing with Zappos.com, your strategic planning team would like you to gather information that is available on Web 2.0 sites, specifically, on their Facebook page and Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsein's Twitter feed. Conducting a search of the web, allows you to identify the pages as seen in Figure 1and 2.
Figure 1: Zappos.com's Facebook Page
Figure 2: Tony Hsein's Twitter Feed
Instead of continuously visiting these sources of strategic intelligence to gather significant data, a Google Reader account can used to manage the entire process by following the three steps.
Step 1: Open a Google Reader Account
With a valid Google account, you can access the reader application that allows you to monitor content on the web via Atom and RSS feeds and web addresses.
Step 2: Add web address and RSS feed
With an open Google Reader account, copy and paste the web address of Zappos.com Facebook Page by clicking on "Add subscription" as seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Adding Zappos.com's Facebook Page To Google
The same process can be used to add the RSS from the Tony Hsein's Twitter feed.
Step 3: Manage Subscription
Now that the address and feed are added, you can start managing and browsing through the content through Google Reader. Figure 4 illustrates the final product of the three step process which are the tweets from the Twitter page.
Figure 4: Zappos.com's Tweets Via Google Reader
The content from the Facebook page is available in a different file on the reader application.
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