I HAVE LEARNED a lot about newsfeed syndication since my first hand-rolled RSS feeds in 1998 and because of my experience, I know professionals depend upon more than method of pushing content from their websites.
FACT: You cannot depend solely upon Google crawler services as your primary point of reference. If you do, you may miss important developments when Google fails to notice a change. I have listening posts that include Electric Search from Zenark, a watchlist containing terms mentioned on Twitter, and Wonder Reader on my Nokia Lumia phone. Wonder Reader listens to tweets, Delicious, and Pinboard. I normally catch things as they unfold when I listen to these disparate sources of business intelligence.
Because of issues with SayMedia's content management system, probably related to the legacy structure of my InsideView blog, the Googlebot sometimes fails to detect a change in my website when I set a draft blog post to auto-publish at an embargo time. This is apparent in the screenshot I made from Statcounter yesterday. My Typepad CMS published content about "Rebooting RTE" shortly before 8AM Irish time and it went onto Twitter as a shortened link. A few people read the blog post within a half hour. Then Amazon's crawler arrived and put the blog post into Kindle Publishing Services for Americans who read my blog as a Kindle product. I watched a trickle of people read the item from auto-published feeds on Google Plus and Facebook. A few hours later, Wonder Reader picked up my blog post as an aggregated item in a newsfeed. Within 24 hours of the post being published, 79 people had read the item on my blog and up to 300 people read it via a news aggregator. You can see all this activity in the public stats shared via Statcounter.
So here's a Protip: If you pay a copywriter to produce time-sensitive content, you should also ensure that content reaches more than one channel immediately after its publication in its primary location. That's why I like pushing content to Amazon, Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter. In some cases, I also link to the blog post from Flickr.
We plan to offer members of the Clonmel Chamber of Commerce Protips like this one during a morning event in LIT-Clonmel on Tuesday, May 22. Feel free to offer your own ideas as comments where you see this blog post appear in your information stream.
