Taming Tony (a.k.a knowledge management)
September 17th, 2008 Posted by: l.dewis
So it’s all about the conversation people. Getting in there, feeding back, being part of the convo, ya? But there are a lot of you out there to talk to, so I’m going to have to start judging you all against very strict criteria. RSS filtering is the online equivalent of looking over someone’s shoulder at a party to see if there’s someone more interesting to talk to. I hate myself for it, but needs must. This is a work in progress but already I realise that I will not withstand my own harsh criteria. At least I will stop talking to myself, as I strike myself off a list of “people to listen to”.
So solution number one. I’m using RSS Aide (strapline: Read what matters) to streamline my RSS feeds into returning only blog posts I’m interested in by relevance and reaction. Tony Hirst’s OUseful blog is one of my favorites but he writes very detailed posts, not all are directly relevant to my work and some frankly fill me with self loathing at my comparable lack of knowledge, rendering me too depressed to continue working. In an ideal world I’d be paid to read all Tony’s posts for fun, but this is the real world, so in the name of productivity I’m going to try reading just the posts deemed good by the PostRank engine of RSS Aide. PostRank judges posts based on the numbers of comments, and social bookmarks and probably a few other secret ingredients. Today this looks like this:
Tomorrow I’m going to sort the people I listen to by their contributions to discussion. That should sort the wheat from the chaff.
Excuse me a minute, I’ve just seen someone I need to talk to…
Entry Filed under: Web 2.0
5 Comments Add your own
1. Guy | September 17th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Nice idea. You must be really oversubscribed. Why not just delete all your feeds and rediscover them again when interesting stuff crops up? Some of the best posts i read don’t even have comments (adactio.com) so your criteria wouldnt work for me. Good luck though.
2. l.dewis | September 17th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Yes, I’ll probably find I’ve been too strict but it’s an interesting exercise. The thing with doing PR is that it’s part of your job to be oversubscribed as you have to monitor posts and comments and work out who are the voices of influence that you should be following. There are numerous companies out there who you can pay to do it for you but I like to see how far I can take it using the free tools.
3. Guy | September 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
so it’s part of your job to follow influential people? What happens next? I’m genuinely intrigued to know what the end result is.
4. Laura | September 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Not just people who would be considered influential in general (journalists, innovators, CEO’s etc) but people who have an influence on how people behave or policy around education and technology – lots of people listen to them, they are good at generating interest and debate, their opinions/personal brand gets attention in the search engines, they influence discussions outside their own publishing sphere, they are seen as gurus in the communities they engage with. This could be one of our students or a journalist from TechCrunch. What happens next? You listen and learn and feedback to people who could benefit from the knowledge. You talk, but only usefully, not because you like the sound of your own voice or because you want to be seen to be joining in the conversation. Talk is even cheaper now than it ever was, so where you can usefully contribute to a discussion you do, and from there you build a relationship with the influencers (if you haven’t already got one offline) or you direct the influencers within the OU to join the discussion. If you have a good relationship with an influencer that you share interests with, it is easier to pitch to them when you want to get the word out about something (and you know how they like to be pitched to – many journalists only accept delicious pitches for example). If they have something negative to say about the OU, at least they are likely to have a more informed view if they have spoken to you, and you will have a chance to put your view across. But it’s only a part of my job to do this and its not exclusively a PR role – lots of people are doing this within their own areas of expertise. It just becomes more important from a PR perspective when you really want to change behaviour or policy – you need to know who your influential advocates and adversaries are if you are going to have a chance.
5. Guy | September 18th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Very enlightening, thanks for taking the time to write that!
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