Did a “Little Bird” Talk to You About Social Selling?

Content marketing and social selling are all the rage lately. But in order to actually take those terms to heart and do them takes a lot of diligence and powerful tools. This review is for a new service, Little Bird, that is a search engine to find influencers. They start with the content and tie into the social graph (the stream of one individual as well as others in that topic area) to determine who you should listen to.

Little Bird is the best tool I have found for finding experts on a particular topic. Sure, I can do a Twitter search, but that’s pretty limited and just brings up people who put the term in their bio or a recent tweet. But what if you want to find people with real expertise, with real influence? You could look at their Klout score, but that’s still slightly suspect, frankly. The only way I have found is Little Bird. You start by running reports on particular topics, as you see in the screenshot below, then you can drill down further.

This blog post by one of the Founders, Marshall Kirkpatrick, is an excellent overview of why you’d want to try it out: I Found the Leaders in My Field, Now What?

In a nutshell, Little Bird can help you:

• Find new leaders to follow.
• Create an influencer engagement game plan.
• Discover your freshest connections.
• Find top people to reach out to by Twitter Direct Message.
• Research someone else’s connections.

You can see below some of the topic experts Little Bird found for me on Customer Satisfaction. These are a few of the people who are Most Followed:

 What I Really Like:

• You can discover influencer connections on multiple social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and more.)
• Cool visualizations to explore topical communities (I couldn’t do this on my own, with my trial plan, but Marshall walked me through a detailed demo).
• See how you compare with a topic of interest. For example, I wanted to see how well I am engaging in the customer satisfaction space for my new site: Satisfaction Scale. I found that I still have a long way to go as you can see below.

Then I asked Little Bird to compare me to this topic of Customer Satisfaction with its 72 experts. It found that I was not following as many as I would have hoped. But, the great thing is â€" it helps me to engage with those people. Not in this case, but some of them might be prospects or good people to blog about or whatever reason you have for finding experts.

What I Would Like to See:

• When you do the compare function and it brings up the experts you are following and not following, it would be great to hover over the profile photo and simply add the person to your Twitter following. As it works right now, nothing happens on hover, but it does take you to the Twitter site which is a slow way to follow new people. You can see the people in other function areas by hovering, but still it takes you offsite.

Overall, if you are in the marketing, sales or communication space, Little Bird is an invaluable tool. There’s a 7-day free trial, after you get into the private beta, then it is $50/month for an individual plan and $250/month for a small business plan.

Did a “Little Bird” Talk to You About Social Selling?

Content marketing and social selling are all the rage lately. But in order to actually take those terms to heart and do them takes a lot of diligence and powerful tools. This review is for a new service, Little Bird, that is a search engine to find influencers. They start with the content and tie into the social graph (the stream of one individual as well as others in that topic area) to determine who you should listen to.

Little Bird is the best tool I have found for finding experts on a particular topic. Sure, I can do a Twitter search, but that’s pretty limited and just brings up people who put the term in their bio or a recent tweet. But what if you want to find people with real expertise, with real influence? You could look at their Klout score, but that’s still slightly suspect, frankly. The only way I have found is Little Bird. You start by running reports on particular topics, as you see in the screenshot below, then you can drill down further.

This blog post by one of the Founders, Marshall Kirkpatrick, is an excellent overview of why you’d want to try it out: I Found the Leaders in My Field, Now What?

In a nutshell, Little Bird can help you:

• Find new leaders to follow.
• Create an influencer engagement game plan.
• Discover your freshest connections.
• Find top people to reach out to by Twitter Direct Message.
• Research someone else’s connections.

You can see below some of the topic experts Little Bird found for me on Customer Satisfaction. These are a few of the people who are Most Followed:

 What I Really Like:

• You can discover influencer connections on multiple social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and more.)
• Cool visualizations to explore topical communities (I couldn’t do this on my own, with my trial plan, but Marshall walked me through a detailed demo).
• See how you compare with a topic of interest. For example, I wanted to see how well I am engaging in the customer satisfaction space for my new site: Satisfaction Scale. I found that I still have a long way to go as you can see below.

Then I asked Little Bird to compare me to this topic of Customer Satisfaction with its 72 experts. It found that I was not following as many as I would have hoped. But, the great thing is â€" it helps me to engage with those people. Not in this case, but some of them might be prospects or good people to blog about or whatever reason you have for finding experts.

What I Would Like to See:

• When you do the compare function and it brings up the experts you are following and not following, it would be great to hover over the profile photo and simply add the person to your Twitter following. As it works right now, nothing happens on hover, but it does take you to the Twitter site which is a slow way to follow new people. You can see the people in other function areas by hovering, but still it takes you offsite.

Overall, if you are in the marketing, sales or communication space, Little Bird is an invaluable tool. There’s a 7-day free trial, after you get into the private beta, then it is $50/month for an individual plan and $250/month for a small business plan.

What is RSS? And Is It Still Important?

What is RSS?

RSS has been plagued by geeky terminology in the past. We’re going to explain it here in business terms â€" and why it’s still important.

Usually when someone gives a definition of RSS it reads something like this:   The acronym “RSS” stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.

Uh, that really helps explain RSS, doesn’t it?  :)

We prefer to explain it this way:  RSS feeds give readers a method to keep up with their favorite blogs, news sites and other websites.  Anyone can choose the sites they wish to subscribe to, and then get updates in one centralized location.

In essence, RSS allows the content to come to you. That means you do not actually have to go to each blog or website individually when you want to view new updates they’ve published.

What do I use RSS for?

That depends on whether you are consuming content created by other sites, or you are the website or blog owner.

As a consumer of content:

Much like magazine or newspaper subscriptions, RSS brings the content to you as the person reading it.  You’re not limited to reading in a feed reader.   For instance, using a tool like IFTTT or FeedBurner, you can trigger an email to be sent to you whenever your favorite site updates.

For business owners, there are plenty of blogs and news sites, such as Small Business Trends, that contain useful information and tips that you can subscribe to.  We give instructions for how to subscribe a little later (below).

As a website owner or blogger:

For bloggers and website owners, RSS is a good Web marketing tool.

It is a means to create a loyal repeat following.  It helps you grow your site by keeping you top of mind with your readers.  Here at Small Business Trends we have many thousands of subscribers who get a daily email of fresh content we’ve published.  That’s in addition to subscribers to our weekly newsletters.

As a blog owner or website owner, it’s up to you to create and publicize your RSS feed.  Most blogging software makes this easy on the blog owner, because the software automatically creates RSS feeds.  WordPress, for example, is one content management system that automatically creates an RSS feed for the site.

Here’s an interesting factoid about WordPress and RSS feeds. You can generate a feed for any page in your WordPress  site simply by adding “/feed” at the the URL of a WordPress site.

You can also update your social networks (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) automatically from an RSS feed using a tool like TwitterFeed.  This saves you time.

As a consumer of content, how do I subscribe?

RSS feeds can be read using an RSS reader or read app.  Reader examples include Feedly, The Old Reader, and NewsBlur. There are also desktop and mobile apps that deliver RSS feeds such as NetNewsWire and Flipboard.  Get Prismatic is another interesting reader app.

One of the most popular readers, Google Reader, is in the process of being shut down.

Once you’ve chosen a reader app or service to use, you can then choose blogs and other sites to subscribe to. Each reader has a slightly different process for subscribing.

You’ll need to find a Web URL for the RSS feed.  The easiest way to tell if a website has an RSS feed is to find the orange icon â€" pictured above- somewhere on a website page (often in the header, sidebar or footer).  On some sites, such as large news sites, you might need to find a page with “Subscribe” options, as the site may offer different RSS feeds for different types of content.

Then right click on the RSS icon and choose “copy link address” or similar command.

Many sites offer RSS feeds through FeedBurner, a service of Google that makes RSS feeds prettier and more user-friendly.  FeedBurner-converted feeds often contain a link that will allow you to select your reader and subscribe with one click.

Is RSS dead? No!

Google has not invested in improving FeedBurner, its RSS “convert-to-pretty” service, in a long time. Then Google made the decision to shut down its popular Google Reader service.

Those two factors have led some to predict the death of RSS itself.  For instance, at One North, one person writes, “I’ve always had a hard time convincing people outside our industry to use RSS. The best explanation I could offer was to compare it to Twitter.”

It may be true that end users are not subscribing to RSS feeds in feedreaders as much these days.

But it’s also true that RSS is everywhere whether people realize it or not.

One way to think of RSS is like plumbing.  It works behind the scenes.  It’s the pipes that make content portable on the Web.  RSS is still a key way that content published on one site can be seen (either in full or perhaps with just a headline and short snippet) in other places. For instance, RSS is how a lot of content gets fed to social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn in the first place.

Popular publications like Small Business Trends get considerable traffic from people who read in feedreaders or emails.  A recent 30-day period saw 292,000 views of RSS content, and 449,000 clicks back to the site.  Not too shabby for something some claim is dying ….

Keep in mind, that’s based on FeedBurner statistics.  FeedBurner mainly tracks Google Reader stats these days. Over 90% of our subscribers according to FeedBurner are Google Reader, but many newer services don’t appear to be tracked.  If that’s true, then the impact of RSS is understated.

Some worry about scraper sites picking up your content and using it via RSS feeds. John Battelle, Chairman of Federated Media (an advertising partner of ours) attempted to shut off full feeds for his content several months ago. He then  relented based on his audience feedback â€" the article and its comments are good reading.

Despite rumors of its death, RSS is alive and well on the Web today â€" working behind the scenes.  One day it may be replaced.  But until there’s a widespread and easy-to-use replacement format, RSS is still important.

RSS Photo via Shutterstock

Present Shock: Taking A Moment to Review the Future

One of my best friends referred me to the book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now after we debated about technology’s impact on society.  Are our lives better now with the technology that has become widespread? Are we “better people” because we can share information so readily and instantaneously?

Those questions are particularly poignant when we think about the potential usage of gadgets and capabilities developed just in the last year. Google Glass.  The spread of mobile apps.  The anticipation of an automated driving car.  You can even look at the Amy’s Bakery Company debacle. Despite the eruption of opinions in that instance, one has to ponder the gigantic effort a small business can face when its reputation is in the combined hands of new tech - social media - established tech - and television.

The book’s author Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff) has more than a light interest in tech-induced behavior. An award winning social critic, Rushkoff has written numerous books examining societal views of technology. The life questions in his latest book can inspire small business owners to assess their own beliefs on what is making their business and lives better for themselves, their associates, their employees and the family and friends who support them.

Is This the Life We Really Want?

According to Rushkoff, we poorly assumed how our lifestyle would change with technology.  We thought we would be “futurists” - making the right predictions that matter. Instead, we have found no zen state with the events that occur through technological usage.  Rushkoff notes our constant distractions, presuming that the information we have immediately before us is urgent.

The end result is a narrative collapse - losing a linear progression of events that forms a story.   We use narratives to tell the story about important events in our lives let alone our business.  Today, our environment assimilates bits and pieces of information, producing outcomes that demand personal vigilance and management.

In addition to narrative collapse, Rushkoff summarizes other tenets to our digital environment:

• Digiphrenia: How technology lets us be in more than one place and be more than one “self” at the same time.
• Overwinding: Condensing large time periods into much smaller ones,.
• Fractalnoia: Making sense of our world entirely in the present tense, by drawing connections between things - sometimes inappropriately.
• Apocalypto: The intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale.

Within these titles, Rushkoff makes relatively good distinctions on the core symptoms of his societal diagnosis and notes the offshoots from the outlined tenets.  Digiphrenia is meant to distinguish value from fragmented waste - the pay off is to not treat “data flows and databases interchangeably,” for example.

That ability to distinguish value flows well into topics about our society as a whole.  Check out how Rushkoff cites the Occupy Wall Street movement as a parallel to narrative collapse - with no goals from a narrative collapse, societal movements appear more frantic and extreme, sending a seemingly never-ending message stream instead of establishing an achievement.

It is not about winning some debate and going home. Rather, as the product of decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability…Occupy Wall Street is not a movement that wins and ends; it is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion and creates as many questions as it does answers.

As I see today’s analytics adopts more real time features, I do appreciate what Rushkoff sees. He outlines consequences that business can use as a starting point to understand if personnel are unnaturally aligned or if goals to integrate technology are unsustainable and unattainable.  Read Rushkoff’s citation jet lag as an early example of an advancement impacting physiology:

But no matter how well technology overcame the limits of natural time, our bodies had difficulty keeping up….Back in the 1950s, for example, when jet passenger service was still quite novel, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew to Egypt to negotiate the Aswan Dam treaty. His minders assumed he would sleep on the plane, and they scheduled his first meeting after they arrived. He was incapable of thinking straight, his compromised perceptual and negotiating skills were overtaxed, and he failed utterly. The USSR won the contract instead, and many still blame this one episode of jet lag for provoking the Cold War.

In its own way Present Shock extends the dialog highlighted in Against The Machine by Lee Siegel, but with less cynicism about how information is created. Siegel cautioned on the internet’s destructive nature to obscure promises of free expression and independence. Rushkoff counters by having the reader note the tradeoffs , bullish that the reader will pickup the alarms:

Instead of attempting to retrain the body to match the artificial rhythms of our digital technologies and their artifacts we can instead use our digital technologies to reschedule our lives in a manner consistent with our physiology…Technology may have given us the choice to defeat our natural rhythms, but we then built a society and economic order around these choices, making them seemingly irreversible.

Much of the content is meant to appeal to readers who are not accustomed to reviewing code or software development, so a developer may not feel the book speaks to them. But if you are reading other business books on technology you will imagine some useful parallels. Rushkoff’s cautions on reduced critical thinking parallels cautions being on customer service “autopilot” as Chris Zane warns in his book Reinventing The Wheel.   He highlights the always-on philosophy works well for “many businesses” , while “our digital selves are distributed across every device, platform, and network.”

Rushkoff is a proactive critic - he shuttered his Facebook page, critical of its sponsored stories feature and subsequent data usage.   I think after reading this book you’ll become pretty proactive in setting your own technological strategy.