What’s an easy way to show your boss that you’re going above and beyond? Staying on top of what’s going on in your industry. How can you do this easily? Feedly. *not sponsored*
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a term for a technology format that allows you to follow a news feed. All kinds of online news websites and blogs have RSS feeds, from CNN to The Hollywood Reporter to Uber’s engineering blog to your favorite fashion blog.
Using this technology:
I work at an advertising agency and my client is Amazon. Amazon has so many different lines of business and has competitors in pretty much every category. I could individually go to Target, Google, and Spotify’s newsrooms and check for updates every day, but that takes way too much time. I definitely don’t want to subscribe to their blogs and get a ton of email notifications, either.
Enter Feedly!
Feedly is an RSS reader that aggregates all your news feeds into one place. There are different paid plans, but the free version allows you to follow 100 feeds, which is plenty for me.
How to get started:
1. Go to feedly.com
2. Click “Get Started for Free” and create an account. You can log in with Facebook or Google so you don’t have to remember a new password.
3. Type a keyword into the search bar or paste the address of the website you want to follow.
4. Click Follow then create and name your feed. Your feed will now show up on the left-hand menu and you can click into each website to see an individual publisher’s content.
And that’s it! Now you can follow up to 100 sites and organize them into different feeds. Feedly also has a mobile app so you can check your news on the go!
I usually just look at my general Amazon feed to keep up with all the competitors, but it’s easy to click on the Target blog if I want to just see Target’s updates. However, I don’t only want to keep track of what Amazon’s competitors are doing, I also want to see what other brands are doing in general, so I created a marketing feed as well. I also use Feedly just for fun, so I made feeds for the entertainment trades and photography and travel blogs.
TAKE IT FURTHER:
Send your boss a weekly Friday round-up email of articles. My manager had me do this when I was interning at a tv studio, and now I do this at my full-time job 3 years later. People don’t have time to read through a ton of articles every week, so it’s helpful if you provide a short informative summary and link to the article.
Tip from my journalism background: All the most important information will be in the first few paragraphs of the article. This was more relevant when all news was published in print, but journalists put the 6 W’s at the beginning of the article. If the editor needed more space on the page for something else, they would just chop the paragraphs from the bottom of the article.
Let’s take this article from Variety: https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/spotify-buys-megaphone-podcast-advertising-1234826863/
This is what it would look like in an email round-up:
Spotify Buys Podcast Ad-Tech Firm Megaphone for $235 Million in Cash
Spotify has acquired Megaphone for $235 million in cash. Megaphone provides podcast hosting and ad-insertion capabilities for publishers and targeted ad sales for marketers. This acquisition will allow the two companies to make dynamic streaming ad insertion available to third-party podcast publishers for the first time. The deal comes after Spotify launched the proprietary Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI) system earlier in 2020, which lets advertisers buy targeted podcast spots on Spotify’s own platform. Advertisers will soon be able to buy spots across Spotify’s original and exclusive podcasts as well as across the Megaphone Targeted Marketplace.
I copied and pasted the first three paragraphs of the news story and then deleted the fluffy words and made sure it had all the key information. The headline is hyperlinked if someone wants to read the rest of the article.
This is a great way to show that you’re engaged and providing extra value to your team. You can also show that you’re in tune with the industry when you go into job interviews and demonstrate you’re knowledgeable about innovations in your field.
