What Are Your Information Filters?

After I started Tweeting,  my blog activity took a nose dive. Most of my LinkLog entries are now tweets. So here is my first attempt to take some of my tweets and elaborate a bit.

“Social Media and Business Intelligence” Presented by Phil Brittan, CI Manager at Best Buy http://bit.ly/a7mn0o

This is notes from SCIP10 (annual conference on Society for Competitive Intelligence).  If you go to the link you notice that the CI Manager at Best Buy has some advice on why you should follow social media.

A lot of information; you can use free or paid software filters to digest the river of data

Obviously the industry is aware of this problem too. That is why there are so many high paying jobs in social media as you can see below:

Source: Indeed

So here is my question to you. It is easy to be buried under this river of data? How do you make sense of it. What are your Information Filters? How can you find the information that is useful for your business?

I struggle with this all the time. While I devote a couple of hours each day to consume and produce social media information via Blogs, Tweets and LinkedIn, I still do not have a good solution. Here are a few thoughts:

  1. Set up Yahoo Pipes to filter the information stream
  2. Set up Google alerts specifying Twitter as a source (using site: )
  3. Follow a few companies on LinkedIn (you are interested in) using LinkedIn Follow Feature
  4. Build your own filtering tools.

I think the information mining business could be a big one. We are working on some tools but they are very elementary. I would love to hear how you solve this problem.

Meta:

First of all let me clarify that Competitive Intelligence is Intelligence to make your business competitive (and not just information about your competitors).