One thing that I really wanted to do at the NetSquared conference was to help more people learn about RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. I didn't get to do that then, so here's an introduction to one of the most useful ways you can implement this powerful technology.

It can be important to keep track of when our organizations or key stakeholders are discussed online, for both seizing opportunities and doing damage control. By using RSS, you can perform a search once and subscribe to receive all future search results automatically. Many people use Google email alerts for this function, but the advantages of using RSS include not losing results in your inbox, searching a wider variety of source types and perhaps letting this be your introduction to RSS feed reading in general.

There are three basic source types that are good to watch for mentions of your organization: news, blogs and the web at large. Below are instructions on how to subscribe to searches in my favorite search engines for each of these three fields, followed by a few strategic things to take into consideration when making use of RSS for this purpose. These steps will help you automatically recieve any new mention of your organization on websites, news stories or blog posts in near-real-time.

Any questions left in comments will get a speedy reply.

Choosing a Feed Reader

For the purpose of this post I won't go into detail on how to select from the many RSS feed reading services available. I'll just point you towards either Bloglines (easy to use) or Newsgator (only a little less easy to use, but I prefer its functionality). I personally use NetNewsWire, a desktop feed reader for the Mac (in case you were wondering) but that's a bit more complicated. Other popular options include MyYahoo and Google Reader.

Bloglines will give you a button you can place on your browser's toolbar or favorites to click to subscribe to the RSS feed of any page you are on. Newsgator requires that you copy and past the RSS URL (address) into its "add subscription" field. You can also get a one-click subscribe button for Newsgator in blummy.com, a wonderful service I recommend checking out if you have time.

News

Almost all news search engines now offer RSS feeds for their results. You may prefer the results from Google News, Yahoo News, or Topix.net for strong local search of US sources. In any of these search engines you can perform a search for any term, puting multiple words in quotation marks if you wish to search for the words together as a phrase.

You can see below a results page for a Google News search for NetSquared OR Compumentor OR TechSoup. If you are using an RSS feed reader with a one-click subscribe button on your browser, you can click from the results page to subscribe to future results. In the bottom left hand side of the screen you'll see a link labeled RSS. If you are using a system that requires you to copy and paste the RSS link, that's what you are looking for right there. If you click on the link you'll be taken to a page of code, but it's just the address you need. So right click and copy on that link and then paste it into your feed reader.

Blogs

There are many options available for searching blogs. I would not recommend the most popular one, Technorati, because many beginning bloggers have a hard time getting indexed there, the RSS feeds are less easy to subscribe to and I believe the time-to-index is a little slower than some other options. Technorati is best for , searching for whole blogs by theme and looking for high-profile bloggers.

For search subscription I would recommend either Feedster or Google Blogsearch. Both of these offer fast, broad results. You'll notice that Feedster also offers news and podcast search.

Subscription to these feeds are done the same way as news search described above, though in Feedster you'll see the orange RSS broadcast icon in front of the Subscribe to this search RSS link.

Web search

One great reason to use web search engines other than Google is that MSN Search offers a RSS feeds. This means that static or legacy web pages where MSN Search finds your search term will be delivered to you. This is good. If you need to copy the RSS URL in an MSN search, the orange RSS button at the bottom left of your results page is what you are looking for.

Strategic considerations

A few things to think about: First, I'd recommend putting all your reputation tracking search feeds in one folder so each result is visible from the mass of other feeds you're sure to subscribe to now that you are comfortable with RSS.

Second, in addition to variations on your name, you may also want to subscribe to searches for the names of key stakeholders or other parties of interest.

Also, you don't need to get overwhelmed by RSS feeds. You can subscribe to as many as you wish and just read the items in your most important folders regularly. Other feeds can be checked when you have time, they'll all be in the same place once you've subscribed in a feed reader. For an advanced discussion of RSS strategy, see my NetSquared interview with the fantastic Lisa Williams. Net2 team member Alex Samuels also has a great RSS intro site called RSSTocracy.com.

I'll be posting more here in the future about how to use this and other Web2.0 tools in a nonprofit context in addition to the interviews I'm doing. Feel free to post any questions, objections or requests for clarification below in comments and I'll post a response.