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!
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