I am an author of an Italian online magazine called Che Futuro, which has grown to have a pretty large digital footprint. When it started there were only 30 authors, and they had an idea to quickly reach a fairly large number of people.
The idea involves a tool called Twitterfeed. The main idea is that you tell your Twitter account to tweet whenever a website publishes a new update (also works with Facebook and Linkedin). Once you set this up, there is no need for further action: all updates from the site are automatically tweeted by your account, until you decide to revoke that instruction. The website does not need access to your username and password.
It works like this:
- We all created accounts on Twitterfeed
- We linked our Twitter and Facebook accounts to Che Futuro's RSS feed. An online magazine is basically a multiauthor blog, so the fit was good. Drupal is also very good at creating even highly specific RSS feeds through the Views module (see), so Edgeryders and LOTE5 are also a good fit.
- Each of us customized the way the RSS feed-driven updates would look on our Twitter stream, to differentiate our own tweets from Che Futuro's. There are several parameters to do this:
- frequency with which the feed is checked (30 mins to 24 hours)
- maximum number of updates you want to publish. For example, if you set it to 2 and the website has published 3 new updates since the feed was last checked, only 2 of them will be published onto your Twitter account.
- where you want to publish the updates (Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin)
- prefix/suffix: for example, I prefix all Che Futuro's updates like this: "Dal team @chefuturo: ". This helps my followers distinguish between my own tweets and the magazine's.
I think this makes sense for LOTE5 and Edgeryders in general. It is a simple way for people who want to help, but have little time, to do so; and for us to leverage the power of community into communication with a human face… or actually many of them. What do you guys think?
