Following is a guest post from the one and only Nedra Weinreich, a social marketing consultant who publishes Spare Change.
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I engage with social media on and off all day – both in my own work and in how I help my nonprofit and government clients to promote their health and social issues. Because I’m online so much, I have to take charge of my internet interactions so the digital onslaught doesn’t overtake me. I’ll share a few tools I use to make the web my own.
Filter
Be picky about the items that get your precious time and attention. To bring my key sources of professional information together in one place, I use Bloglines to subscribe to RSS feeds of blogs and news sources (if you’re interested, here is my social and nonprofit marketing Bloglines subscription list).
In addition to known sites, search tools help me capture the information I need from disparate places around the web. Google Alerts are a simple way of setting up ongoing keyword searches and being notified via email or RSS feed when new items appear online. For example, I have searches set up for “social marketing,” “nonprofit marketing,” “social change,” my name and my blog URL. Similarly, you can set up standing Twitter Search queries that are fed to RSS or through tools like TweetDeck.
Customize
I love Firefox as a browser precisely because I can customize my online experience to meet my specific needs. My Firefox add-on secret productivity weapon is LeechBlock. Tell LeechBlock which sites are your procrastination time-sucks and how much time you will allow yourself to be on them before your access is blocked (I give myself 10 minutes per hour).
Analyze
If you have a website or blog, monitor who is visiting and how they use the site. The best web analytics service I have found is Performancing Metrics. While the free version is excellent, for $20 a year more you get incredibly detailed data: besides the standard metrics, you can see your visitors’ organizations, page-specific inbound links, the outbound links they click, and track every action in realtime. These stats are powerful and help you know your audience inside and out.
Take control and own your web too!
Photo Credit: somefool :: Matthew Maber
