BUILDING RIVERS OF INFORMATION: STEP TWO, CHOOSE YOUR TOOLS

Once you’ve tapped into a strong flow of information, you’ll need tools to help you
aggregate, filter, store, and pass on this information. The good news about this is many entrepreneurs have identified these needs as well, so we have new tools being provided constantly to help us do each of these tasks. Let’s take each area individually and look at how to
do it, and what tools can be helpful.

• Aggregating the information flow means using applications to consolidate many sources of information onto one screen. This is important because it takes too much time to scan your river for the important things if you have to go to 50 places to even find the information. It’s possible to actually have most of your information literally come to one screen using tools like Google Reader and NetVibes. There are also tools like Tweetdeck and HootSuite that we described earlier.

• Filtering information is the process of routing or highlighting bits of information that have a much higher chance of being important than others. This is where tools like the alert systems come in. Add to alerts tools like competitious.com, mentioned earlier, and you have the ability to highlight pieces of information that are the most important.
• Even within tools like Google Reader, you can do searches of your information streams to pull out keywords so you can more quickly see specific pieces of meaningful information. You can even set it up so content from your more useful sources is sent to your e-mail so you never miss seeing it.
• Storing information means having a way to archive information you run across that
might be needed later. Generally, the flow of information is so large, even when you take your small percentage, trying to go back and find something you saw two months ago is a challenge. For this reason, it’s helpful to have storage processes for anything you believe might be needed in the future.
• Do this by creating documents, presentations, and spreadsheets where you add pieces of information as you go along so that you’ve indexed documents by subject, which makes it easy to find something later. There are also tools like Evernote and Onenote that help
users quickly archive pieces rmation.

• Having ways to forward information is critical because as you see bits of information that you know would be helpful to others, you need “one click’’ abilities to route information to a person or a group. This helps you give back to the river by being a type of filter yourself. The people around you will place a high value on being connected with you because they’ll see you have a good eye for useful information.

Some people will want to use e-mail as a delivery source to redistribute interesting things they find. Others will want to create personal blogs, or use tools like Tweetdeck and TBUZZ to forward information to groups. Expose your people to the possibilities in this area, but don’t force them to use a specific tool they won’t be comfortable with.

BUILDING RIVERS OF INFORMATION: STEP ONE

First you must select your personal river from the overall ocean. For most people, we’re only interested in a tiny fraction of the overall categories of information that are streaming around the world. To the extent that we can define what information is beneficial to us and then find the best sources, we’ve discovered a powerful flow of information we can act on.

Most people have little idea how much information is available in their field. Truth be told, many people would tell you they have 80 percent visibility into the information they need, when the reality is they have 5 percent at their fingertips.

To locate valuable sources of information for your river, you have a couple of options.

The first is to interview lots of people around you and find out what they’re using to gain information. This provides a great start.

The second step is to search online for sources you haven’t found to this point. This can be done by using tools like blogged.com to search through their index of bloggers to find ones in your field, or twellow.com, which provides the same service for Twitter users.

 Industry associations put out many sources of digital information these
days. Industry analysts provide reports, some free, and others for a fee. Depending on the field you’re in, the government provides information that could be helpful.

Running alerts on keywords can yield new sources of information, as you can discover
people commenting on your field that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

You only need to invest a few hours asking people around you what electronic sources of information they’re using and another few hours of intelligent searching, to build a strong initial source of information. Once you tap into a new list of information sources, you’ll see immediate results. This step is critical because the steps that follow won’t matter much if you don’t have a powerful and relevant wellspring of information coming in.

Media Accent Nigeria
Posted by Dominic Nwelih



KEYWORD ALERTS

Using alerts on specific keywords from your industry is a simple task. There are numer-
ous free services such as Google Alerts, Yotify, Socialmention alerts, and Alerts.com that will let you track any mention of a keyword from your industry, and send you an e-mail with the link where you can find the information. Run a sophisticated set of alerts for three months and you’ll discover hidden streams of information that others may never find.

HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL RIVER OF INFORMATION

There are a few challenges you might run into when designing and monitoring your river of information. Although the concept may sound simple, the volume, speed, and never-ceasing flow of what comes across the Internet can make building an efficient river of information tough.

Over the coming decade this will become an important career skill that will get refined as people learn and share best practices. We’re being handed free online tools to help in constructing and using
your river. This is making the job simpler all the time.

We have some early tools to work with, and the process for building a river has already
been defined by some early pioneers.

These people have reduced this to an art form where a person can gain access to the most important pieces of information critical to their lives with the least amount of time invested. From them we’ve developed a simple set of steps that you can follow to build yours.

 Pay attention and be sure to invest enough time and energy in each to implement them. The price for being sloppy in any step is missed information that could be
critical to your success!

The great thing about adding this capability to your inventory of skills is that the construction process can be done in a day. From that point forward, the investment is
monitoring, saving, and passing on the bits of information that can be helpful to you or the organization.

The other task is to constantly improve your sources of information and the tools
you use to aggregate and filter them. As with many skills that require up-front training then demand ongoing improvement, building a river of information is easy to start, then takes the rest of your life to refine.

INVEST THE TIME UPFRONT

The simple three-step process we would share in the next post can easily be taught to others. Be warned, however, that if a person doesn’t invest the time to fully implement any one of the steps, it will negatively impact the results.

This is especially true of the early steps in settseng thewhatss. For example, if you fail to identify the most useful sources of information, much of
the daily work to monitor it will go to waste.
Media Accent Nigeria
Posted by Dominic Nwelih

CREATING SOCIAL MEDIA STARS

As with any skill, some people will excel at being a content provider and surrogate voice for the organization. These social stars will develop an innate sense for the recipe of information your constituents want to hear and the tone of voice that's perfect for representing your
organization.

This is a new and valuable skill that must be nurtured. It's a good idea to keep your
eyes open for the people who might have the right combination of skills to become social stars.
Typically, you’ll find that this person must have a combination of industry knowledge,
the ability to write well, empathy for your constituents, and a good sense of what content will be interesting and valuable. This person will combine all of this with a clear understanding of how
social tools work.

 This can result in a growing network of people connected to your information
channels.
Once you’ve found a social star, it’s important to leverage his or her talents quickly and deeply because every constituent he or she helps connect to the organization is a potential new
customer. The thing that excites social stars the most is being able to nurture online relationships with many people. What they want and what the organization needs are usually the same thing—a large audience participating in the conversation.

Media Accent Nigeria
Posted by Dominic Nwelih