Carefully Crafted on August 28

10 Newsle Lists to Create Right Now

In the barrage of information, do you find it’s hard to keep up with the people who matter most? Are you missing opportunities to cultivate relationships because you’re not as “in the know” as you should be? If you’re like me, you love stumbling across new tools/service (like ifttt) that help me work smarter and better.

Say hello to Newsle:

Newsle tracks people in the news.

Newsle finds articles about you, your friends and colleagues, and anyone else you care about and notifies you minutes or hours after they’re published.

Newsle’s private beta launched in January 2011. The current version, which launched in February 2012 is a major evolution of the original concept. Newsle combs the web continuously, analyzing over 1 million articles each day – every major news article and blog post published online, as well as most minor ones.

It’s sort of like Google Alerts, but for people, not topics.

As a PR person and an entrepreneur responsible for the firm’s business development, I’m relying more and more on Newsle as a relationship-building tool. Whether I’m tracking people who refer us business, prospects, journalists, bloggers or other key connections, Newsle makes me more effective and efficient and building and cultivating relationships. Having used it for a couple months now, here are 10 ways I think entrepreneurs and communicators can leverage Newsle.

HOW TO: Use Newsle to Build Better Relationships

Create Newsle lists of:

  • Referral sources
  • Prospects
  • Clients (and not just your main client contact. Remember the other decision-makers and powers-that-be within the organizations)
  • Former clients (if the relationship ended positively, former clients can turn into referral sources or become clients again!)
  • Journalists, bloggers and influencers you’ve previously worked with
  • Journalists, bloggers and influencers you want to work with
  • Connectors, leaders and other people that are simply good to know/keep tabs on
  • Role models and people who inspire/motivate you
  • Conference organizers, association leaders and other industry-specific “gatekeepers”
  • People “in your corner” (Who are the people rooting for you to succeed? Your advocates and cheerleaders — don’t forget to nurture those all-important relationships!)

Ready to get started? 

  • Go to newsle.com to create an account.
  • Import your Facebook and/or LinkedIn connections. (This is optional — just depends how you want to use Newsle.)
  • In the search bar, type the name of someone you want Newsle to follow for you
  • Go to a person’s profile to follow him/her.
  • After you follow a person, you can create lists and add people to the appropriate list.
  • Repeat until your lists are built.
Update: As Cheryl Harrison discovered, if you connect with LinkedIn or Facebook, it will import all those friends/connections, so if you collect Facebook friends like my brother collected baseball cards, consider yourself warned. Or else, you’ll get LOTS of updates from people you may not want to follow so closely.

How do you stay “in the know?” Share your approach in the comments so we can all learn! 

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