24 Reasons to Set Up Your Personal Listening Outpost

There are an overwhelming number of choices in the ever expanding world of social media, new media and Web 2.0.

It seems like each week a new technology emerges that promises to make learning about, and connecting with, clients and prospects easier.

The problems are:

• understanding the shear volume of new technologies is a full time job
• implementing even a portion of what you may understand takes dedicated time and resources
• the regulatory agencies, along with compliance departments, have strong feelings about how these technologies can be used.

As a result even though you may understand the value of a technology, and ultimately make the decision to implement it, that technology may not be allowed by your firm.

The fact is that there are three ways to engage in social media: Listening, Talking and/or Collaborating.

Here’s the good news: You Don’t Need Compliance Approval to Listen.

Listening in this context refers to using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to get intelligence and education about your clients, prospects, strategic partners, vendors and competitors.

Think about it in terms of setting up a Personal Listening Outpost.

From this command center you’ll now have the ability to keep tabs on the news and information you need to form faster relationships with clients and prospects.

With this intelligence you’ll have the ability to:

• shorten the intelligence learning curve
• bridge the trust gap more quickly
• form a far deeper ‘root system’ with your most important relationships

Here are 24 more reasons why setting up a Personal Listening Outpost using this technology makes sense:

1.   Free yourself from the toxic wasteland that is your email inbox.

2.   You’ll visit fewer sites directly but you’ll absorb more information, more quickly.

3.   Prospects will be amazed at how much you already know about them – even before you start to formally profile them.

4.   Precious few, as in almost none, of your competition uses these RSS tools.

5.   Most of your competition doesn’t even know what RSS is.

6.   There is nothing you can’t uncover, both for good and evil. This is all good.

7.   Save volumes of time – get your news delivered to one central location for reading each day. No more bookmark, click, read, bookmark, etc. syndrome.

8.   This technology is easy to set up and effortless to maintain.

9.   You are not limited to ‘real news’ from ‘regular publications’.

10.  Without the need to subscribe to traditional publications you’ll save money – a great thing as we work our way out of the recession.

11.  Without the need to subscribe to traditional publications you’ll save a tree – or a couple of million.

12.  Setting up and maintaining the Personal Listening Outpost is free.

13.  Incorporating ‘custom’ RSS feeds (i.e. alerts, searches, twitter feeds, etc.) expands your basis of information – making you even more informed.

14.  There are RSS readers available for everyone; simple to complex, utilitarian to pretty/sexy.

15.  Incorporating blogs into your RSS feed (shameless plug, sign up for this feed today) gives you perspective you won’t get from mainstream publications and over-air news sources.

16.  Information coming into your RSS feed is not subject to spam filters.

17.  You will earn volumes about your competition – read the RSS feeds from their sites, news alerts, blogs, tweets, LinkedIn, etc.

18.  Learn to speak a new language – the language of a new niche group you want to market to.

19.  Download music? Subscribe to podcasts? Use iTunes to get them? You are already familiar with RSS.

20.  You can’t ‘break’ anything on your computer by subscribing through an RSS reader.

21.  Stay current on forum threads as new comments are added.

22.  Kids soccer games, church meetings, wine tasting Meetup – many post schedules via RSS.

23.  There is an urgent need to get out of the sea of sameness – today.

24.  Your MQ – Memorability Quotient® soars.

Have shorespeak at your next regional, divisional, or national meeting. We’ll give your attendees the information they need to set up their own Personal Listening Outpost and demonstrate that you can Listen Your Way Out of the Sea of Sameness!