Principled Innovation LLC

Time to use Google Reader!

October 1st, 2006

ATTENTION ALL ASSOCIATION EXECUTIVES…I HAVE GOOD NEWS!

(No, I didn’t save a bunch of money by switching my car insurance…)

I am extremely pleased to tell you that our friends at Google have re-designed the user interface of Google Reader, and that is a very good thing for association leaders who have been reluctant to dive into reading blogs and listening to podcasts up to now. Google Reader was an excellent tool before these recent changes, and now it is even more aesthetically pleasing and intuitively simple to use. And since so many of us are already familiar with and use other Google services everyday, it will be quite easy to add Google Reader to your daily toolbox.

So, if you’re among the large group of association executives who aren’t in touch with what is happening with social media, this is your opportunity to get going. To facilitate this for you, I am providing very simple instructions to get you started. It should take you less than 20 minutes to set this up:

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A GOOGLE ACCOUNT ALREADY:

1. Go the Google Reader home page and locate the “Not using Gmail or other Google Account services? Create an account now” box in the lower right corner of the page.
2. Click the “Create an account now” link and follow the instructions on the page that comes up to create your Google Reader account.
3. Follow any instructions you receive from Google to confirm your account.

IF YOU HAVE/ONCE YOU HAVE A GOOGLE ACCOUNT:

1. Before opening your Google Reader account, download this file to your desktop. (You can do that by right clicking the link and highlighting Save Link As or Save File As…) It is a file pre-loaded with association-related blog feeds that you will upload to your Google Reader account.
2. Login to your account from the Google Reader home page.
3. From the home page inside your account, click on the Settings tab in the upper right corner to the right of your e-mail address.
4. From the Settings page, click on the Import/Export link near the top of the page.
5. From the Import/Export page, find the section labeled “Import your subscriptions” and click the Browse button. Find your way to the directory for your Desktop and select the “Association-Related Blog Feeds” file you downloaded in Step #1.
6. Confirm that the name of this document appears in the Import your subscriptions field and click the Upload button.
7. You should receive a message confirming the successful uploading of your subscriptions. If they upload successfully, you will see 17 subscriptions of association-related blogs, including the P.I. Blog, under the name Principled Innovation LLC.
8. Click the Google Reader logo in the upper left corner of the screen to return to the home page. You are now ready to begin reading your feeds using Google Reader!

Once you have completed these eight steps, I encourage you to spend a little bit of time exploring Google Reader’s tools and features. I think you will find them quite useful. And if you get stuck, you can always click the Help link found in upper right corner of every page.

As you begin to add new feeds to Google Reader, I think it will very quickly become one of your go-to resources for accessing information from a wide variety of sources. If you’d like to print off these instructions easily, you can use this PDF. Have fun!

If you're new here, I hope you will consider subscribing to the P.I. Blog. Just click on this link to add it to your RSS reader. You can also receive e-mail updates by subscribing via the box located on the blog itself. Thanks for visiting!

Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, Announcements, What's New?, The Principled Innovator Newsletter, Social Media, Audioblogs & Podcasts, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator