Is your company looking for a free tool to monitor the latest happenings about your green business or environmental news? Are you struggling to keep yourself updated about what your customers and stakeholders are discussing about your company brand?
This post shares why your company should monitor your business, stakeholders, and industry, and how you can use the free Feedly tool to set up a free dashboard to keep track of news, websites and blogs related to your business.
Business Success Begins with Monitoring
In the globalised market, customer needs, government regulations, industry trends, and competition can change in a short period of time. For your green business to succeed in this rapidly changing market, you would have to constantly monitor what is going on in your industry, and what your customers and stakeholders are saying about your brand or your competitors. With this information, you can plan ahead and adjust your business strategy and focus accordingly.
In the past, you probably have to conduct surveys and focus groups, or engage consultants to derive this customer and market intelligence. But if your company has limited financial resources, you can use basic free tools to help you to monitor what is being said about your green company and stakeholders, and find out the latest environmental news in your industry.
Of course, the free tools do not allow you to monitor everything in depth as compared to professional paid tools or consultants, but the free tools are still able to give you a basic overview of what is happening.
Here are 4 steps to build a free monitoring dashboard using Feedly:
1) Open a Feedly Account
Feedly is a free tool for you to gather and read all the websites and blogs that you are interested in, using RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and the RSS feed of a website automatically shows new content from the website as it becomes available.
All you need is to subscribe to a website’s feed in Feedly, and you can read the website’s latest updates on Feedly without going to the website. This allows you to easily read multiple posts and updates from different websites in one location. You can also choose the layout of the news easily.
Sign up for Feedly at http://feedly.com/.
2) Subscribe to Websites
Find the RSS feed of the websites and blogs that you are interested in and subscribe to the feed. Click on the RSS feed and choose to add to Feedly. Or just copy the RSS feed url, paste it in the search bar in Feedly, and find the correct RSS feed to add to Feedly.
Once you are subscribed to a website’s feed, Feedly will automatically show the latest posts from that website and show new posts as and when there are new posts from the website. You can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you like. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of your stakeholders and competitors, or blogs and websites related to the green industry.
3) Subscribe to Google Alerts
You can use Google Alerts to monitor updates of the latest relevant Google search results (news, blogs, web, videos, discussions, and books) via email or RSS.
For example, to track online news with the keywords “Singapore” and “sustainability” in it, enter “singapore+sustainability†in the “create an alert” box. You can choose options on how often and the source to deliver to. Choose RSS Feed and click on Create Alert, and a RSS feed will be created which you can add to Feedly.
You can subscribe to keywords such as your company’s or competitor’s name, or any green terms related to your industry.
4) Organise the Feeds
In Feedly under Organize, you can create collections to group and manage your feeds so that it is easier to refer and read what you are interested in. For example, you could create collections called:
“My Company†to monitor the feeds related to your company. You could have feeds for keywords such as your company name or product brands.
“My Competitors†to monitor the feeds of your competitors.
“Industry News†to monitor the feeds for the different green topics related to your industry.
“Business Ideas†to monitor feeds of websites that provide business or marketing ideas that could be useful for you.
These 4 steps will enable you to create a free dashboard using Feedly to monitor your green business, your stakeholders, and environmental news. Stay updated on the latest green trends and use this monitoring dashboard to help your business to stay ahead of the competition and explore new opportunities in the green industry.
What are your thoughts? Are you using Feedly or other dashboard for monitoring? What’s your experience? Please leave your comments in the box below.
