Posts Tagged ‘Networking’

One of the things I love about Facebook is that developers can create applications for the rest of us to easily use. Back in March I promoted one called Social RSS. It worked great for a while and my blog posts were imported in to my Facebook Page without any issues. I even forked out the minimal fee of $24 to have the feed pulled in at a more frequent rate than the free version. No sooner had I done that, I started seeing issues with delays of over a day for my posts to show up in Facebook.

Then I found RSS Graffiti. This application is FREE which is always good! And it updates immediately! I just did a post on creating RSS feeds from the Meetup.com group I am an organizer for. To pull it into Facebook, I used RSS Graffiti.

Log into Facebook, then use the search feature at the top and type in RSS Graffiti. You will need to allow this app to have access to your profile or page before you can have the feed pulled in. Once you have done that, you can set up as many feeds as you want to. I have three set up for the New Lawrenceville Facebook Profile that I moderate. Enter in the url for your RSS feed. You can then set up how many items from the feed you want to pull in, if you want a text prefix before each article is posted, and other useful settings. Do all of that and then save.

RSS Graffiti will start working immediately. Once your feed is updated, you will see the articles posted directly on your Facebook wall. Hope you find it useful!

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If you are a small business owner, no doubt you are a member of a few networking groups. One of the groups I am most proud of being a member of is the New Lawrenceville Group on the Meetup.com site. I am one of the organizers and also moderate the group on Meetup.com, on Facebook, Twitter and also at www.NewLawrenceville.com. Anyone that updates multiple sites knows how time consuming it can be. I wanted to figure out a way to get information out to these various outlets with the minimum amount of effort!

Enter, the Meetup.com API. An API (application programming interface) allows you to call for information from one software or application, and pull in that information into another program or application. To use the Meetup API, you need an API key. If you are a member, you can get that automatically by logging in and going to http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/key/

Here is more information from their website. By clicking on Get an API key, you will be given a series of numbers which will be used when you create the call for information.

There are a variety of methods for returning the information. It can be in XML format, ATMO, JSON, KML or RSS. For my purposes, I wanted to create some RSS feeds that I could then pull into Facebook, Twitter and other sites. You can see in the screenshot below an example of pulling in data for an XML file.

Following the directions on the site, I was able to create a feed to show all new meetings we scheduled, recent activity, RSVP’s for meetings and a feed to show new members when they join our group. The link below shows how I created the one for new members. The number at the end would be your unique API Key (mine was changed for this example, don’t share your key if you can help it!).  I can then take this RSS feed url and plug it in wherever I need it!

http://api.meetup.com/members.rss/?group_urlname=newlawrenceville&page=600&key=123456789123456789123456789

Here is how the feed looks within Internet Explorer. It will pull in the photograph of the member, their name, location, and bio. Fantastic!

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I am proud to be one of the organizers of a local networking group here in Lawrenceville, GA. We have events a couple of times each month. This past event we were lucky to have George Robbins there from Your 1 Minute. He creates videos for business owners to help promote themselves and their company. Here is one he did as a gift for our networking group. Thanks again George, it looks fantastic!

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