(Post by Michelle Drumm, Media Manager at IRISS)
For the last four years at IRISS, I’ve been involved in creating a daily social services news feed and email newsletter. We like to keep up to date with what’s new in social media and are very open to using it to improve how we do things. And our news service has evolved over time. Until Google killed it off in July 2013, we were using Google Reader, a tool for reading news feeds (or RSS as it is often called). In summary, this involved ‘starring’ items in Google reader, and putting these items through Feedburner (another Google service) to create our own customised RSS feed and email newsletter. Lots of people are still using RSS on other types of reader such as Feedly and Bloglines, and it’s still a great way to manage news.
The demise of Google Reader prompted us to explore more effective (and savvy!) ways of providing sector news. Scoop.it! was something that appealed as it offers an easy way to gather topic-specific news together in one place. And not only that, it enables us to give our own insight on news articles and then share them to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s not just useful to organisations, individuals can use it too! And many do. It’s great for ‘scooping’ information on personal interests, as well as work-related stuff, and you can curate as many topics as you like using keywords. Scoop.it! suggests content based on the keywords you tell it to use, and although it does some of the work for you, you also have the ability to pull in RSS feeds from your favourite websites and blogs, and even add Facebook and Twitter feeds!
In summary, Scoop.it! will:
- Save you time searching for relevant content on topics of interest
- Enable you to customise your own news
- Allow to comment on news and share your insights
- Display news in an interesting, user friendly way
- Not cost you anything – it’s free to use (paid-for options available)
Visit our Social Services sector news on Scoop.it! to see an example: http://www.scoop.it/t/social-services-news
Free, Pro and Business versions are available. Full details are available in the Plans section of the website.
Like all social media, Scoop.it is much easier to do than describe. So why not ‘Just do it’ as we encourage at IRISS – and Scoop.It!