Michael Pollan is an hugely popular author, as his public Google Alerts account shows, but keeping him in front of his fans is still important. It’s also necessary to spread awareness of his work to younger people who may not read the NY Times, but would be very receptive to his message of sustainable food. It looks like someone convinced him to start a Twitter account, but he hasn’t been very active.
He’s only posted one tweet in the first month of having the account. He’s a very busy guy, so it might make more sense to create an automatic source of news that his fans can turn to and help spread on social media. Let’s take a look at some of the ways AlertRank can be used to republish his Google Alerts in more effective formats.
Automatic posting to a Twitter account
Adding the Michael Pollan Google Alerts to a Twitter account is a way of putting them into social media circulation. Fans of his books can follow the account, and then retweet the alerts they find interesting to their own followers. The alerts will also have keywords in their titles that other Twitter users will pick up through search tools, which will grown an even wider follower base. Just building followers for the sake of large numbers is silly, but a follower list that is entirely based on interest in your author can be extremely valuable. A publicist can add tweets to this account to announce upcoming events, articles the author has written, or additional products based on his work.
AlertRank has an automatic tweeting feature, so all we have to do is create a free Twitter account to collect these alerts, and tell AlertRank to start autotweeting.
This Google Alerts account gets an average of 30 alerts a day, so we will let all of them go to Twitter. If the volume of alerts was very high, we could have AlertRank filter them based on a wide range of criteria, and even set an absolute limit per hour and per day.
Automatic posting to a Delicious account
The same strategy can be used with Delicious as well. We can create a free Delicious account, and have AlertRank automatically post all the alerts as bookmarks to this account. We can even tell AlertRank to tag all these alerts with michaelpollan.
As these alerts appear on Delicious, others will notice them, and add them to their own bookmarks as well. It is a subtle way of spreading links to news about your author. As with Twitter, we could tell AlertRank to filter the alerts going to Delicious, or limit their rate, if the flow was too high.
Unified RSS feed
Giving the Michael Pollan fans a single RSS feed for all their news is a very convenient delivery vehicle. Google Alerts delivers each feed separately for each search term, which can get very messy if you have lots of search terms. I can’t imagine asking someone to subscribe to 10 different feeds. AlertRank combines all the alerts for an account into a single feed, so you can post a link on the author’s site to let people subscribe easily. Here is the feed for the Michael Pollan account.
You can also use an RSS widget to publish this feed on the author’s website, or to let fans publish it on their own pages. This Grazr widget is an example of the type of RSS widget that is freely available.
Putting it all together
There are a lot of moving parts here, but the nice thing is that the whole system is completely automatic. Once you set up the accounts, the alerts just flow from Google to AlertRank, and then out to Twitter, Delicious, and the RSS feed. It sure beats getting reprints from magazines and mailing them out, like in ancient times.
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