By bbr

by Kelly Lucas, marketing and social media manager

If you’ve not yet heard about Newsle, then do I have a treat for you! Newsle is a platform that brings you news stories that feature your personal and professional connections. By connecting your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to Newsle, the site will notify you whenever any of your contacts is mentioned in an online article. You probably aren’t going to take the time to set up a Google Alert on everyone know, so Newsle allows you to passively receive alerts on items you may have otherwise missed. From Newsle’s CrunchBase company description:

While there are already “people search” sites and social news aggregators, Newsle does two things that haven’t been done before:

• Finds real news about–not by–your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts (no tweets, no statuses, no “social noise”)
• Combines this with news about public figures you select, in a single newsfeed

We’ve developed sophisticated algorithms to disambiguate between people with the same name, to evaluate the importance of news articles, and to optimize your newsfeed as you rate and interact with articles.

You can adjust your settings to send you weekly reports or mentions as they happen so that you are always immediately in-the-know when a colleague is referenced. There are a few ways you can use Newsle to your benefit:

Keep tabs on yourself: Odds are you’ve already got a Google Alert set up to send you links when you’re mentioned, but it never hurts to have an extra set of eyes when it comes to your online reputation. (If you don’t have a Google Alert for your name, then we recommend you do that as well!)

Use as a means to break the ice: We’ve all connected on LinkedIn with people we’ve met once or twice and then never really communicated with again. But perhaps you’d like to break the ice and start up a new conversation. Info sent to you from Newsle gives you the opportunity to reach out and congratulate them on writing a great article, being an informative source or maybe receiving an award. Besides opening another networking door, it’s also just nice to be able to make someone smile across the internet via kudos, and who doesn’t like warm fuzzies?

Stay informed on your less socially active colleagues: While most of your connections will be quick to share their articles via social media, not everyone is inclined to do so. Some feel awkward about it and some just don’t have the time and forget. Newsle will help you keep up with those who aren’t as active in social media as others, allowing you to maybe be one of only a few who is aware of their online presence.

Great for market research: If you’ve got potential clients as connections, staying informed of their activities is a great way to get a feel for what’s going on in their company and where they may have pain you can help alleviate. If they are being cited in articles about their industry, you can gain great insight as to what their current needs are and can directly address those when you reach out to them.

Newsle is a great way to help you with your business networking. Not only does it help you stay informed on your connections in general, it allows you an opportunity for communication that may not have been available to you before. After you’ve signed up for Newsle, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this new service.