Many of you might have used Google News Alerts - the free service that scours the web on a regular basis for mentions of your key contacts. It is a pretty cool service, but there’s a downside – you have to individually enter names that you’d like them to seek out, which means most of us miss out on some valuable intel.
Newsle.com is like Google Alerts on steroids. It notifies you when any of your contacts are mentioned on the web and is automatically synced with your LinkedIn and/or Facebook. Which means – with about 30 seconds of setup time, you can have a daily/weekly update on when each of your contacts is mentioned on the web for social, charitable, professional or other reasons.
The following is a three-step game plan for getting started:
1) Get involved.
Go to www.newsle.com and create an account. It’s really simple as long as you’re willing to give them access to your LinkedIn and/or Facebook contacts. As far as we can tell, your contacts are in no way notified of this. If you’re worried about safety, take solace in the face that LinkedIn owns Newsle…so they pretty much know your contacts anyway.
2) Review your regular emails from Newsle.
When setting up your Newsle account, you can set your email frequency to daily, every three days, or weekly. We’d recommend setting it up as weekly, so as not to become numb to the information. When the email comes in, take the time to actually read it.
3) Use this information in real-life.
This information is sent to you automatically, but it’s not acted on automatically. When you notice a client in your Newsle email, call them and say something like, “I noticed you on (insert website or periodical) the other day linked to your involvement in _____________. That’s fantastic.” That’s it - you’re just calling to recognize the fact you saw them. If they are a prospect – the fact that you saw them is an excuse to follow-up and move them to the next phase of your pipeline. You might say, “I saw you on (insert website or periodical) the other day linked to your involvement in _____________. That’s fantastic. It reminded me – we need to get back together and continue our conversation…”
As with any technology, Newsle is only as good as the user. Give it a try – it’s a super simple site – we think you’ll like it.
