How to get the most value from FirstRain newsfeed analytics

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Today, I met with Teresa Ferraro and Mike Buttrum from FirstRain in their Manhattan office in downtown New York City. IBM recently contracted FirstRain to provide IBMers like myself with analytics on publicly-available news to keep us informed for business meetings. Here's how IBMers can get the most out of this service.

Basically, FirstRain takes a list and generates the best summaries of publicly-available news that are most relevant. You can organize into different channels. Here I have seven channels.

Companies to watch refer to existing or prospective clients that I plan to be talking with soon. Some of my colleagues are assigned to specific clients, so they can set this up once and enjoy the news for the rest of the year. I, on the other hand, meet with different clients every week, so I will be updating this list on a frequent basis.

I have divided the Competitors between major ones, and smaller startups. Since I am often working with business partners and distributors, I made that a separate channel as well.

For product lines, I picked three: Data migration, Data storage solutions, and Software defined storage.

For conferences where I don't know which companies will attend, such as the IBM Technical University, I can set up information by territory. Here is one for Brazil.

I also attend industry-oriented events, so I can pick those vertical markets that might be helpful with dinner conversations. In this example, I chose Energy, Electric Utilities and Gas Utilities.

Once you have your channels configured, you get your results in various sections:

Management Changes lists any changes in top C-level positions, who left the company, who got recently hired.

Key Developments indicates news like mergers and acquisitions and government regulations.

First Reads prioritizes the top six articles for your channel. You can access more, but these six will get you started as you have your morning coffee.

First Tweets gives you the six most relevant tweets, if those articles above were just "TL;DR"

A section on Business Influencers and Market Drivers is interesting to see who the big players are, and what topics are driving the most conversation. Here's an example from my Energy/Electric/Gas channel:

The Most Talked About section covers quotes and commentary about the most talked about companies in your channel.

With most news sources focused on politics, weather and celebrity gossip, it is nice to have a quicker, more focused approach to get the news I need to prepare for my client briefings. Special thanks to my hosts Teresa and Mike for their hospitality!

technorati tags: IBM, FirstRain, Analytics, Newsfeed