I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I have 43 feeds in my Newsreader just dedicated to Sprout. Ken Yarmosh asked where I came up with those feeds and how we keep them organized. Chris answered that question. But then I thought maybe a few specifics about what feeds I use for Sproutit might be helpful to others wondering how they can use feeds in their business.

So here is a summary of the feeds I have for Sproutit:

Sproutit Internal – 17 feeds – These are feeds only shared by members of our team. I want to know about pretty much everything, so I subscribe to almost all of them.

• 1 feed for our CampaignMonitor account to keep track of how many people have signed up for our newsletter mailing list.
• 6 feeds from our website to keep up on new blog posts, comments and trackbacks to both the Big Act blog, our Newsroom, and a forthcoming Mailroom blog.
• One feed for Basecamp feed. We have 13 projects right now in Basecamp. These projects act like “internal” blogs so people can post updates on different projects. We even have projects for our Investors to log into and our board. Aside from Mailroom, this is probably our most used webapp.
• One feed for our wiki. Our wiki has our marketing plan, policies, guidelines, notes on how to administer our server and how to work with our code.
• One feed for Collaboa, our source code manager. Here we track bugs, planned features, and code changes.
• 2 feeds for Mailroom. Of course, all of our support, contact, and other shared email is done through Mailroom. The best part is, this is all in my newsreader, so my personal email inbox stays clutter free. I love it!
• 1 feed for our del.icio.us bookmarks. We use this to bookmark interesting pages among our team, informally.
• 3 feeds sundry other blogs we have used over time that now get updated rarely if at all.
• 1 feed from the prototype of our Super Sekret Second Product.

Sproutit External – 23 feeds – These are feeds that help me find out what others (especially our customers) are saying about us.

• 5 Technorati feeds. One for each different blog and some ‘ego’ keywords and such.
• 2 Google feeds. One for Google News another for the Google Blog Search
• 1 del.icio.us tag search feed.
• 1 furl feed.
• 2 MSN search and News feeds.
• 2 Yahoo Search feeds
• 1 Icerocket search feed
• 1 Feedster search feed.
• 1 Topix.net feed.
• 1 Feedsfarm feed
• 1 Blogdigger search feed
• 1 Plazoo search feed
• 1 Blogmarks tag feed
• 1 LookSmart search feed.
• 1 WiredNews search feed.
• 1 blogg.de tag feed.

OK, that’s only 40 feeds. Since I last wrote I have actually dropped three feeds that we no longer use. In a few days, I plan to add a few more from our new forum. This is the great thing about feeds; you can add and remove feeds easily in a news reader to get just the information you want to do your job right now.

I hope these are helpful to you. A lot of the tools we use in our business, like Basecamp and Mailroom, can apply to almost any business. Maybe you can use them in your own!

How are you using feeds to run your business? Write your story on your blog, tag it ‘imanagebyfeeds’ and we’ll link to it from our blog here.