RSStling with RSS

A few months ago I took stock of what I had to offer versus what I thought the market was going to demand. I had a strong feeling that monitoring was going to become really important, and so I've got to grips with Yahoo Pipes and Netvibes and made these two systems work well for me.

Measurement is also important - always has been - and so I've beenlooking into smart, repeatable, scalable objective ways in which to measure online performance. Again, I've had success with this andgenerally when I show people how to do it, they 'get it'.

But one thing still eludes me, and it's really really really important. And that is: how to produce reports.

It's fairly easy to produce an outreach report, say, or a report thattalks about what a small group of bloggers has been up to. But I need to scale, so that what works for ten sites will work for 100. Put it this way: I need to produce a report detailing the online coverage for the ITPOES report which has hit literally hundreds if not thousands of sites globally.

I've spent most of today wrestling with this problem. I've tried subscribing to feeds in Google Reader and pulling reports out of that. I've tried importing the xhtml into Word and getting that to play ball. I've even tried downloading so-called XML reporting apps that don't really work at all, it seems to me.

So I'm still left with one more nut to crack. Reporting. Cloud computing has come to the rescue with monitoring - I know, I know, it's my own in-house solution but it works for me - and I'd dearly love it to help with reporting. Just something that lets me format coverage, group it, allow me to feed it into other systems that can get a view on influence for each source. If anyone out there has a take on this, I'd really like to know.

Posted via email from Brendan Cooper – your friendly social media-savvy freelance copywriter and social media consultant.