Swine Flu is the type of news story that demands attention. Google News Alerts will combine results from many sources, but then you need to share it with others. Here’s how you can use AlertRank to assemble the available Google Alerts on a breaking news story into a continuous Twitter stream and a PDF report for periodic emailing.
1. Create a wide range of Google Alerts. If you focus on different sources, you’ll get more results than just a single search on Swine Flu. You should also put a phrase like Swine Flu in quotes to get an exact match.
2. Wait a few minutes for the alerts to start arriving to make sure you are getting the right results. The flow won’t be anywhere near as high as a Twitter search, but you are looking for news reports for authoritative stories, not jokes about pig BBQ and bacon.
3. Direct these alerts to a Twitter account with the AlertRank auto-tweet tool. For cases with a high amount of flow, like this one, you might want to create a separate Twitter account. I created @SwineFluAlerts for this set of alerts. I also has AlertRank add the hashtag #swineflu to each tweet, so they would be found easily in a Twitter search.
4. If you need to share this with people who aren’t familiar with Twitter, you can generate a PDF report every day and email it.
How do you deal with a high impact news story like this? Do you link blog, retweet, post on Digg? What other alert search terms have you found effective for tracking Swine Flu news? Let me know and I’ll add them to this account.
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