Agoracom Blog

Small-Cap CEO Lesson – Your “Personal Business Newspaper” On Google

Posted by AGORACOM at 6:05 PM on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Every time I’ve shown the following to a small-cap CEO, they’ve literally jumped out of their seat and yelled “I want one of those!” (If you’ve mastered RSS Feeds and Readers, don’t bother going any further. If you didn’t understand this last sentence, continue.)

It is that powerful.

What Is It?

Technical Description: Don’t worry about it. I’ll teach you about RSS Feeds, Readers, etc. some other time. All you have to know is this is the web of the future – but you get to learn about it today.

Non-Technical Description: It is the small-cap CEO tool that you have always dreamed about. It turns Google into your very own information gathering spy machine by sucking up every relevant piece of intelligence on the planet (to you) and brings it all into one place – your Google page. No more failed attempts at surfing through more bookmarks than you can ever use. Now, it all comes to you.

But I didn’t know I even had a Google page? You do – you just don’t know how to use it yet.

Can You Describe It? Yeah – but a picture is worth a thousand words.

First, let’s picture what Google looks like when you use it. A big blank white page with a simple search bar in the middle of it. Something like this?

——————————————————————-

———————————————————–

Now, let’s see what my Google pages looks like. These are just 2 samples. Please click on each image so that you can see a full-screen, clear version:

IMAGE #1 – My Business Category

IMAGE #2 – My Gold & Metals Category

As you can quite clearly see, I have multiple, valuable sources of information streaming into my personal newspaper at Google, 24/7/365. I’ve divided my sources into specific categories. I can’t tell you how valuable this has been in terms of:

A] Providing market intelligence – Information overload is useless. Information that helps me beat the competition is priceless. My personal newspaper on Google is equal to approximately 5 full-time (24 hour full-time) researchers at my disposal.

B] Time Management – We all have 436 bookmarks we’ve amassed over time but who has the time to visit just 3 of them per day? Life is busy, so you shouldn’t have to hop from site to site. Now, you don’t have to.

MY MARKET INTELLIGENCE ADVANTAGES

First of all, to call it an “advantage” is probably the understatement of the year. Advantage implies I have an edge, or better odds. This is outright domination.

Google allows me to create my own “personal newspaper” that only publishes information that I ask it to publish. What kinds of information?

1] Any new search engine or blog results relating to “George Tsiolis” or “AGORACOM” or “ABC competitor”. If anything new pops up in this world about me or my competitors, I know about it. For example, a competitor was recently named in an article concerning the latest SEC e-mail spam crackdown. Priceless!

2] News related to my business. I need to know about any new developments in “investor relations”, “investor relations + TSX Venture” , “investor relations OTCBB”, etc. If an investor relations contract is signed or terminated in North America, I know about it. How valuable is that?

3] News related to Web 2.0. If there is a new technology or application that can help my clients or AGORACOM, I know about it.

4] News related to my clients’ industries. I need to know about news or developments that affect my clients in specific industries (i.e. metals and mining; oil & gas). However, with so much noise out there, I only want to know headlines coming out of 10-20 great sources of info. I don’t have time to surf all of those sites – but I can aggregate each of their headlines onto 1 page and quickly scan them for those few juicy articles that help us stay ahead of everyone else.

* Each AGORACOM account executive run their own industry searches for their specific clients

5] Real-Time Market/Economic analysis – I can get today’s headlines from hundreds of sites…but where do you find the best analysis about those headlines? I follow about 20 of the sharpest minds on the web, whose analysis is fed into me all day, everyday.

How do you get one of these? Just ask. This is too good not to share.

Regards,
George

7 Responses to “Small-Cap CEO Lesson – Your “Personal Business Newspaper” On Google”

  1. […] As such, it’s pretty easy to follow his thoughts.  I suggest you follow him via a Google Alert RSS Feed so that you don’t miss a […]

  2. […] don’t use a feed reader – or “personal newspaper” as I like to refer to it – then my post on the subject is a must read for […]

  3. WebUrs says:

    George

    Great points got me to think a bit more, also your suggestion made on IR Web Report. So I took the liberty to take your points into one of my posts as a quote of course. How to avoid wasting more time with online news 🙂
    http://commetrics.com/?p=42

    What you think, would appreciate to get your comments and ideas about this. Thanks for sharing

  4. […] Agoracom – getting your personalised newspaper could help you save time […]

  5. To comment on coping information overload, my very plain approach is to use my own application – Context Organizer – to summarize my reading material. When at a click of a button I see the keywords and the most important sentences – that helps me to quickly decide how useful the information is. In my experience summarization helps with finding specific information in a sea of disparate content and is critical in quickly focusing on the most relevant information. If you were to try it out, I would greatly appreciate your feedback.
    Warm regards,
    Henry

  6. AGORACOM says:

    Sewparman, thanks for the kudos. It is amazing how few people know about this option. Glad you were able to discover it, please pass this post on to others.

    Regards,
    George

  7. Sewparman says:

    George,

    Great article, I have been using Google all along and never knew about Igoogle. I just set up Igoogle myself. Thank you!