Why setting up a dashboard is crucial for your business?

One of the key secrets to the success of business heavyweights like Donald Trump & Warren Buffet is that they consistently stay on top the latest industry news, trends, and competitive intelligence related to their businesses.

It’s reported that Donald Trump wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to read a variety of local, national, and international newspapers and Warren Buffet spends many hours a day reading.

This way they come across very few surprises, and they always have their fingers on the pulse of the topics that matter most.

“I already read a lot of industry related newspapers so what’s the big deal?”

In the past, if you wanted to access the latest market news and trends, you had to spend a small fortune on subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, special reports, and you ended up with a lot of clutter in your office, because of all of the papers and magazines lying around.

If you wanted to share a specific article then you had to scan it, then email it and that took forever…

“So what will setting up a dashboard do for me?”

Your time is extremely valuable. It’s the one thing you can’t get back. Using a dashboard for your business makes it so you don’t have to waste time trying to find websites, blogs, and other news sources online.

You don’t have to spend a small fortune on subscriptions since so much great info is available for free online

The news, email, stocks, sports, and social media feeds come to you in one organized convenient place!

Bonus *Having a dashboard to refer to enables you to quickly find and share the best feeds on your blog, emails, Twitter, FaceBook, etc, so you can quickly be recognized as an authority in your niche.*

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John Lucchetti is a social media and internet marketing expert, and frequent contributor to FolkMedia.org. He concurrently serves as media director for Ad2action.com as well as marketing director for LoveTheTruthClothing.com and eFamilyCounselor.com. Mr. Lucchetti is a self proclaimed “music junkie” who served as a past member of the Southwest Symphony Marketing Committee and past director of “Thursday Nights at the Opera House” concert series.

The biggest problem I’m having with Google Buzz is the inability to update Twitter or other applications. Right now, Google has only made it easy to import Twitter feeds INTO Buzz. There is no way to export Buzz feeds OUT to Twitter.

Until now….

Here are two simple steps to take to import your Google Buzz updates into Twitter.

Step 1: Get your Google Buzz Feed

Google has created a simple API that you can grab your Buzz posts and import into Twitter. Thanks to Shashi Bellamkonda (@shashib) over at Network Solutions for cluing me into this. Simply use the following feed and replace the red text with your actual username .

http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/YourBuzzUsername/public/posted

For example my buzz feed is: http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/joelwitt/public/posted

Step 2: Use Hootsuite to import your feed and update your Twitter stream automatically

Set up a free Hootsuite.com account and click on RSS/Atom Feeds. You will then be able to import your Buzz feed and have Hootsuite automatically post them to Twitter. You can set the frequency and amount of posts to go out to Twitter in the feed settings.

Two things I want to mention about this.

First, it takes some time for Hootsuite to pull down your Buzz posts and send them to Twitter. If you want to update Twitter in real time – don’t rely on Buzz. But it might be useful to have Buzz posts go to Twitter in addition to your regular tweets.

Second, your tweets will say “Buzz by YOUR NAME from Buzz” and then a link to the actual Buzz post. So it isn’t easy for Twitter followers to see your actual message. They have to click on a link to see it.

My hope is that Google will update Buzz to allow us to post to Twitter, Friendfeed and other services directly.

What are your thoughts on all this?

Follow Folk Media on Google Buzz

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Joel Mark Witt is the Publisher of Folk Media and author of 21 Days To Twitter Leadership and How To Use Social Media To Find A Better Job. He is a producer, author, and speaker who consults with businesses and nonprofits on how to use social media in marketing and communications. Get more from Joel on Twitter or Google Buzz.

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.An RSS feed is simply a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

What it does is help you get your content into the hands of the people who want it online.

You can see ours in the upper right hand corner of our website. It looks like this:

By clicking on that rss icon or by copying this URL: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/FolkMedia you can add this blog to your feed reader.

Confused?

Don’t worry – this stumps even the brightest minds. The following video will break the concept down and help you understand why RSS is so important:

*Unedited Source Image By photopia / HiMY SYeD