The key is RSS (really simple syndication). You build your desk top by subscribing to several RS feeds for Web sites, blogs or search results. This allows you to stay up to date without visiting them. By putting all the subscriptions in one place you create your social media desk top. It’s a single place where you can keep an eye on what folks are saying about you, your company and your competitors. Your social media desktop should be something you can skim in a matter of minutes. Anything that can’t be digested in a list doesn’t belong there.
RSS is a simple way for Web sites to deliver a list of the latest headlines, articles or content. There are many free RSS readers or organizing services. iGoogle is one of the simplest social media desktop tools. Set up an iGoogle account, set up an iGoogle Home page, then customize the Home page with items such as search results and your favorite blogs. Here’s how to add feeds to your page. Go to the site, click the RSS subscription button, an add to Google Home page button should appear. You can also add feeds manually by pasting a URL into the “add stuff/add feed or gadget” link on your Google home page.
Rather than following one specific blog you can track what most blogs are saying all at one time by using Google Blog Search. In the menu above the Google logo on your Google home page "images, maps, news," etc. choose the last one (more) choose blogs from the drop down menu. If you want to keep track of your company name in the blogs, put that in double quotes (to include all the words in your company name) then click search blogs. To see the most recent results, click the sort by date link (in the upper right-hand corner). In the Subscribe section (on the left side of the screen), click the RSS link and then select Add to Google Home Page. You can add other search results to your monitoring, such as your competitor’s or product names.
You can create your social media desktop in Google, but a more customizable option would be Netvibes. It is similar to iGoogle but doesn’t have the privacy issues Google manifests. After the standard set-up procedures, delete all the widgets and add your own content preferences.
In Netvibe, you have 2 pages: a public and a private one. You probably don’t want others to know your choice of feeds/searches so make sure you are on your private page before adding widgets. A short cut for adding RSS feeds to Netvibe is choosing “ad feed” and typeing in the Web address of your target site. Netvibe will detect an RSS feed if present and add it automatically. Otherwise you can add the feeds automatically. Go to your target site or blog, choose the Subscribe to RSS link, choose copy link location then paste that into the Add Feed dialogue box in Netvibe.
Using Firefox plug-ins with Netvibe: they are great and easy to install, but do a little research to find the ones that have been around a while and are proven to work.
Once the feeds are on your Netvibes home page, you can change the number of items in the feed box and color code them to make them easier to review.
The next step to organizing your content is creating separate tabs to divide content. You need to be judicious about building your Social Media Desktop. Otherwise it will leave you just as buried in information as you were before you created it. As a rule, add a feed only if: