I was on site today with a really smart client who manages technology strategy for one of the world’s most admired pharmaceutical companies. During idle chit-chat he mentioned that most of his internal clients (VP and above) were being bombarded by information and jargon. I think it’s a problem all executives face. What do you need to pay attention to? And what can you just forget?

One solution is to put you in charge of the news you read and track. Why not just create your own personal newspaper with only the items you care about? The companies you have to track… The sports teams you follow… The keywords you care about.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication - is what you need. It is literally “news you choose.” This short how-to guide will get you up and running in a half hour. It is designed for really smart people who just want results. You know who you are. Brilliant. Not too fond of computers. It also intentionally avoids buying or installing new software. If that interests you, let me know and I’ll share an analysis of different tools you can use (and pay for).

Let’s get started:

The first step is to get a news reader. If you are new to this, I recommend Yahoo’s free one. It may not be “sexy” but it does have the advantage of being accessible from any web browser. This means your personal newspaper from any computer — at home, work, and on the road.

Open a web browser and head on over to to My Yahoo. If you have an account already you may be prompted to sign-in. But let’s assume you don’t, click the news box to add it, and then the “SAVE” button in the bottom right hand corner.

Great! You’re now at a login page. Here you can sign-in or sign-up.

Once you are logged in, your screen should look something like this (colors may vary, but you get the idea).

We’re going to do two things here:

1. Add news from a blog about gadgets
2. Add news from Google that is filtered to track a business issue we want to follow.

Feed #1 - Geeking on Gizmodo

Click on the “add-content” button in the upper left corner of your Yahoo page and a new screen appears like the one below. Next, click on Popular From The Web.

Scroll down the page to “Gizmodo”

Click the “ADD” button.

Click “SAVE” at the bottom of screen

and you will see it has been added:

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#2 Adding A Customized Google News Feed

Go to news.google.com. This site monitors several thousand news-wires and updates the front page every 15 minutes. It is organized like a newspaper: World, US, Business, etc. Let’s organize it according to our needs.

Let’s say you are in the robot business. Let’s ask Google to comb through hundreds of thousands of stories every hour and tell us about “Robots”. If we type in “robots” in the search bar, we get too much info. Let’s refine the search to say “robots usa manufacturing”. We get better results.

Let’s subscribe to this news feed. Click on the RSS feed link in the left margin.

If you are using Firefox you will seen a screen like this.

Click Subscribe Now and you’re done. You RSS Reader now includes one you created to monitor breaking news about robots. And your “My Yahoo” screen looks like this now.

If you use Internet Explorer, there are two extra steps (if your I.T. department permits it, consider trying Firefox). When you click the RSS link on Google, Internet Explorer displays a page like this. Click “Subscribe to this feed“.

Copy the URL from the address bar into your clipboard.

Go to My Yahoo and “add the content” by URL

Paste the URL from your clipboard into the form, and click add.

What to do next

If you are in sales or marketing you really should be using RSS in your tactical plans. The best way to learn is to first consume. Click on all the RSS feeds you can handle. Play around with Google and get it to do what you want. Don’t be afraid to throw away RSS feeds that don’t serve you well. And remember that the more you learn the more sophisticated you can be.