Keeping up with Twittering

Keeping the pulse on social media and monitoring a company’s online reputation is practically a full time job especially for a smaller company not able to afford full scale applications like BuzzMetrics’s BrandPulse products. I find it particularly difficult to keep track of Twitter which pours out an endless stream of great (and sometimes not so great) content.

David Berkowitz wrote a perfect article targeting my pain on Search Insider about “how to monitor Twitter.” One option he mentioned was FriendFeed. I have heard about FriendFeed and they just received some great press from BusinessWeek but I haven’t tried it out. Its model fits a significant marketplace need for aggregating social networks into a single dashboard. As David explained,

“FriendFeed, an identity aggregator that lets you publish updates from a range of social media sites including Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg, StumbleUpon, your blog, and dozens of other sources.”

Keeping up with the stream of content though reminds me of a podcast I listened to from Provident Partners who interviewed Gina Bianchini of Ning (a social networking site) and Robert Scoble. The podcast was titled, “Is social networking right for corporate marketing? Two tests will help you decide.” But it was Robert Scoble who mentioned the need for attention management (versus time management) to handle the deluge of user-content generated from social media.

Trying to figure out what’s important to read and how frequent is a main concern both in terms of productivity but also relative to focus. So now someone needs to develop a “need to know” versus “nice to know” filter to weed through the aggregated noise and expose the golden nuggets of required knowledge.