So we’ve held off on posting about Friendfeed for several months. As adoption has slowly increased, we have started to warm up to it. While it may be too soon to ditch Twitter and throw all your efforts into Friendfeed, it can be a great tool to add to your arsenal. Today, socialTNT takes a look at some of the ways Friendfeed can help you build relationships and more effectively reach your target reporters and bloggers.
What is Friendfeed?
- Friendfeed is a “social aggregator”
- In non-Valley speak: Friendfeed is like the Facebook newsfeed, except it lists all the actions you do across more than 43 sites, including YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn
- Also like Facebook, you can share items directly into your feed.
- Most exciting: Every action in the feed becomes a blog post, letting you comment in a conversation thread
Friendfeed for Media Research
To be the good PR person that you are, you do your due diligence by reading all articles and post by your target journos and blogos–if not daily, then before you reach out to them.
With Friendfeed, you can see:
- All of their latest posts
- What they are reading
- Twitter-feed
- Pictures of the fam
- Videos
Take a look at the page from Chris Nuttall of Financial Times (click to enlarge):
You can stay up-to-date with any of the blogos or journos you follow by adding their feed to your reader. Scroll down to the bottom of the feed and click the RSS Logo:
Get Involved With a Reporter’s/Blogger’s Community
Friendfeed isn’t just a stalking device, it’s a great opportunity for PR peeps to form relationships and have conversations not usually possible.
- Become a member of the reporter’s or blogger’s community by:
- Adding thoughtful comments to their items
- Participating in discussions
Check out the screenshot, below, from Robert Scoble’s feed. The red box shows you where to go to comment. Click “more” to link to this item or share it with your feed.
Click on “more comments” (as indicated by the green box, above) to see the full conversation thread related to that action’s comments. Robert even answers comments:
Getting Started with Friendfeed
- Sign up for a free account
- Add the info from the sites you want to share
- Add me
- Add some Reporters/Bloggers (a few listed below)
- Join “Rooms” or groups based on your interests or your clients’ industry
- Share posts, articles, interesting thoughts
Reporters and bloggers on Friendfeed
Just a small sample:
- Robert Scoble, Fast Company
- Kara Swisher, All Things D
- Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
- Dan Farber, CNET/ZDNet
- Chris Nuttall, The Financial Times
- Adam Ostrow, Mashable
- Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb
- Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat
- Rob Hof, Wall Street Journal
- MG Siegler, VentureBeat
- Rafe Needleman, CNET/Webware
With Friendfeed and Twitter, you have a great non-intrusive way to get to know reporters and bloggers. You also get the chance to join their community and share ideas. Go ahead and give it a shot!
Also, check out the new widgets Friendfeed (like a Blogger Badge, Share This, RSS and others) has recently launched. It also looks like they are trying to speed up RSS. Cool!
Are you using Friendfeed? What has your experience been like? Like/dislike? Let us know in the comments!
Like what you read? Add our RSS feed! [what’s that?]. Or start your morning with socialTNT in your InBox! Or read Chris 24-7 on Twitter!
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Thanks for this post, Chris. The explanation and links are extremely helpful for people like me and my colleague who haven’t quite grasped the usefulness of Friendfeed.
Hi Nikki:
Thanks! I was struggling with the same problem–one reason I held off so long on a Friendfeed post. Glad it helped!
I agree that this is a useful idea for friendfeed. I’m on FF at http://friendfeed.com/davidmullen and my struggle with it so far has not only been figuring out what to do with it, but also:
-information overload. there’s so much info for each person in my network that it’s hard to wrap my arms around it without feeling overwhelmed.
-finding relevant rooms, since you have to know the url to even find them. if FF has a directory of rooms, I haven’t found it yet.
Thanks for sharing this use, though. Again, I think it’s a really good idea. Wish I had thought of it first.
This is a great post Chris! I don’t often find tips on how to do the job of Social Media PR – better, but this has opened a door for me that I hadn’t thought of. Thanks!
Chris–thought-provoking stuff, especially given the Web 3.0 = filters talk. Seems like you’re advocating info overload in order to fit yourself through the target person’s screen (good thought). Perhaps the next breakthrough will be the ability to fit yourself into someone else’s community w/o overloading on information yourself–filters both ways.
Hard.
I really like FriendFeed for the reasons you list for following bloggers and journalists, but I also like that I can share items directly from my Google Reader when I don’t necessarily have time to leave a comment or tweet the post.
Right now, I still tend to get on FriendFeed in spurts, but I can definitely see myself growing into it, especially as it becomes more popular.
Thanks!
[...] Chow Down: How to Use Friendfeed for Better PR: So we’ve held off on posting about Friendfeed for several months. As adoption has slowly increased, we have started to warm up to it. While it may be too soon to ditch Twitter and throw all your efforts into Friendfeed, it can be a great tool to add to your arsenal. Today, socialTNT takes a look at some of the ways Friendfeed can help you build relationships and more effectively reach your target reporters and bloggers… Read more on SocialTNT. [...]