A few days ago, Bmart posted about Finding yourself in the strangest places. His primary premise was that as association executives responsible for marketing, branding, communication, or competitive and cooperative relationships as well as those who blog for fun or purpose, we should be monitoring what is being said about us on the www and the blogosphere. His advice is pretty straightforward and very easy to implement. In order to be part of the conversation we need to not only be speak and be heard but also listen. To that end he provided a number of ideas on how to monitor what is being said.

It’s not the first time that I have heard him make this suggestion but it did made me think a little more critically about what I do to keep track of not only those areas that involve me, my association and members but also all of the topics that I am interested in. As Ben notes, there is a fine line between listening closely and becoming obsessed, but what’s most important is having a process in place that facilitates listening. There is obviously a number of tools and services that one can use to help you keep track of what is being said but I thought I’d share my approach in the hopes that others could benefit from it. At the end of the Association Bloggercon 2007, we did a round-robin sharing ideas on how to be more effective at what we do. My suggestion was to use technology to your advantage. This posting falls directly into that theme.

Ben suggested using Google Alerts to scan any/all relevant media channels to make keeping up with news much easier. While I cannot agree more with his suggestion overall, but anything that generates another email that gets sent into my in box is one too many, so I use a different approach.

Every morning when I start up Firefox, I have it set-up to load my iGoogle page by default. iGoogle (which was formerly known as Google Personalized Homepage) is a customizable homepage that was originally launched in May 2005. In its current incarnation, it includes the capability to add web feeds and Google Gadgets (similar to those available on Google Desktop) and also allows the user to create an unlimited number of tabs, allowing gadgets to be grouped and split up, thus only showing certain gadgets at a certain time based on user preference. The ability to create tabs and add gadgets and feeds is what I leverage to aggregate the news and blog postings to me on a daily basis.

Lets take a look at how I use iGoogle to create an environmental scan that I can reference quickly, easily and at my convenience without adding to my in box clutter. In the first part of this series I will focus on getting you set-up with your own iGoogle account (if you don’t have one already) and adding a new tab/page that will serve as the home for all of the information you are interested in tracking. In Part 2, I will demonstrate a few easy ways to use technology to make scanning your environment easier and also show you how to display the results on your new tab/page using a little known/used feature of iGoogle.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: If you don’t have one already, go to Google and create one.

Step 2: After you have created your account, set your browser preferences use your iGoogle page (http://www.google.com/ig) as your default home page.

Step 3: Having completed steps 1 and 2, create a new tab on your iGoogle page and name it something meaningful for you. For the sake of this tutorial, I named mine “Radar”.

This in turn opens a secondary window that allows you to name your tab.

Be sure that you remove the check from the check box labeled “I’m feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name.”, otherwise what appears on your new page will be rather unpredictable.

That’s it for Part 1. So far we have taken a look at iGoogle and explored some of its features. We have also learned how to create and name a new tab. In part 2, I will show you how to use a few available services to handle searching for information that is relevant to you and how to aggregate the content on your new iGoogle page. Stay tuned, there is much more to come.

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