Does Anyone Still Read Industry Publications?

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From: Andy2Boyz 

The possibilities are endless..., a custom daily briefing on virtually any subject of interest.

I was working my way through a professional membership application when the questions turned to demographics.  How big is your organization?  What is your budget?  How many people in your department?  Then they popped the question that I hadn’t been asked in ages:  What Industry Related Publications Do You Read?

I was taken aback and realized that the question was quite normal in 1995, even in 2005 or maybe even 2010.  But today, in 2013, with the vast increase in social media, blogs, twitter feeds, podcasts, and professional online communities, I must say that I don’t read any of them any more.

It was a good list, made up of the cream of the crop from 2003:  Business 2.0, Business Week, CIO Magazine, Computer World, Forbes Magazine, Info World, Information Week, Network World, Red Herring, Wall Street Journal, just to name a few.  But the reality is that it has been many years since I received any physical magazine in my inbox.  Come to think of it, for the last 18 months, I received nothing physical at work, other than a few vendor gimmicks.  All of my communications and my consumption of content has become digital.  The switch finally happened and I didn’t even notice.  Read on to see how this Social CIO keeps current today.

It started about four years ago when I began following thought leaders, analysts, and bloggers on twitter.  I found if I was selective with my “follow” population, I could get a customized feed in my twitter stream every day, throughout the day to satisfy my technical appetite.  Once I started following 400 or 500, I began to get overwhelmed, missing many tweets.  As a result, I found myself getting very selective about adding new tweeters to my stream.  That’s when I discovered the power of twitter lists. 

Twitter lists are an ingenious invention that allows you to segment those you follow into logical lists grouped by topic, locality, or anything you like.  I pulled together about 300 sources that I thought were most valuable based on my then-current interests around Enterprise 2.0 and Mobile trends.  That became “The Short List”.  It wasn’t so short, at 300 sources, but provided a very focused feed and allowed me to keep adding to my twitter “following” number without worrying about getting overwhelmed in the feed.

Later I created an additional list, simply called “list”.  I didn’t want to offend anyone on “the short list”, but this group was mostly professional acquaintances and a subset of my “short list” pared down to the 100 that I wanted to follow even closer.  Since then, I’ve added other lists for various topics, and followed lists created by others who’s opinions I respect, but I keep coming back to my “Short List” as the key source for my daily information feed.

Moving from Push to Pull

My personal daily paper 

I dabbled with Zite, and Flipboard, but found those too restrictive and never really liked the editorial choices they made.  But my Short List was just what I wanted to hear from every day.  Then, about two years ago, I stumbled upon Paper.Li.  This handy website takes my “Short List” and builds a daily paper based on the most popular feeds of this custom list of curators working just for me.  “The Short List Daily” as it is called is my daily paper giving me a quick briefing on all tech trends and topics.  It groups them into sections (business, technology, stories, culture) and sometimes even into hashtag groupings around events that might be taking place (#e2conf, #e20s for example). The paper has been indispensable.  I like it so much, I share each new issue every morning on my twitter feed.

Curated by the top influencers in
Enterprise Mobility

Just recently, I discovered a service called Littlebird created by industry veteran Marshall Kirkpatrick.  Littlebird does the work of finding the 500 most influential tweeters on any subject (instead of having to build my own “short list”) and allows one to build a twitter list from the result.  I took the list for Enterprise Mobility (created by @ITSinsider using the service) and fed it into Paper.Li and now I have a second “paper” to read every day, “The Enterprise Mobile Daily”.  Littlebird can also create a custom feed of blog posts from all of these top influencers as well.  Imagine a custom feed of all the blog posts from the most influential tweeters on the subject of Mobility, or Enterprise Collaboration, or DNA testing.  The possibilities are endless, providing today’s tech savvy information consumer a custom daily briefing on virtually any subject of interest.

Future this! collects future
oriented stories

I have also found a few other custom papers that I like to check into frequently.  “Future This!” is one of the best at following developments in future thinking.  I’m sure if you check around, you will find any list or “paper” on the subject that interests you as well.

I have just mentioned two sources of expert lists and content presentation platforms.  I expect there are and will continue to be other products continuing to evolve as they tap into the collective editorial skills of the crowd and produce custom feeds of news, trends, and developments in a handy easy-to-digest format.

So, getting back to that original question, What Industry Related Publications Do You Read? For many today, it’s the wrong question all together.  The real question should be How do you stay current in today’s fast evolving technology world?  My answer is a customer feed of self-maintained and custom generated expert lists, combined with the publishing platform of Paper.Li.  I would love to hear how you stay current in the comments below or through your return tweets.

Now, do you understand why the entire print news industry is on “death watch”?

Sections of The Short List Daily

Why is Yammer Worth $1.2B?

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You cannot underestimate the power of "working out loud" with social tools.

Over the last 48 hours there have been many words written about the rumored Microsoft acquisition of Yammer, but very little about just what Yammer is and why Microsoft would care.  In fact many have never heard of Yammer and wonder just where did this come from and why would Microsoft pay an Instagram price for this company with a potato like name.

The social revolution happening in the consumer space has also been happening within corporation.  It goes by the name of Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, or Social Enterprise.  Yammer is one of the early products who picked up on the twitter model of short messages posted to followers, but they keep it within the firewall of large corporations, creating a "walled garden" for private discussions within local and far flung offices of a company.  I was introduced to the product about 3 years ago when I was working for a global company with tens of thousands of employees.  About 1000 had already picked up on the idea and found great value in the self forming communities and open communications that Yammer enabled. 

Yammer claims to be used in 200,000 organizations and makes their entrance most often through a "freemium" approach.  The cloud based product can be enabled by any employee with a company email address.  Once enabled, the employee invites colleagues to join, tying the network together by the common email domain that is required to confirm your membership.  Often the network grows quickly outside of the watchful eye of the Information Technology department and before you know it, there is full scale, crowd driven collaboration taking place.  IT can't seem to understand why a product like this is needed, since they already offer email, IM and SharePoint collaboration sites.  But Yammer is special, it is a rebel product that can be installed, promoted, and maintained by Marketers or Sales people.  Yammer builds in viral hooks that encourage users to bring on more within the company using the email system.  Once they see a network picking up, Yammer's sales people begin to contact the heavy users and start the up-sell process to try to convert the service into a subscription at $5 to $15 per user per month. 

The irony is that relatively few ever convert.  A network of 10,000 users would cost $600k to $1.8mm per year at those prices.  The main advantage to a subscription is the ability to have better control, mainly in deleting employees that have left the company. It is not until IT and Legal get involved that anyone wants to even consider a pay model.  So, for the most part, the process continues and corporations in mass adopt this free service as a entry point into enterprise collaboration.

So, just what does Yammer do for a corporation?  Why would it be worth $1.2B as an acquisition?  Yammer provides an excellent selection of desktop and mobile clients that bring the network to the employee 24x7 on any device.  Just like Twitter, they offer a simple web interface, but also offer a desktop client and apps for every major mobile platform.  The security is simple and on a smartphone, the application is always on and always accessible, enabling quick and easy collaboration riding on top of the popular BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) wave.  

I used Yammer to monitor the flow of conversation within my company.  People would post ideas, suggestions, questions, or links to corporate intranet content.  Others would build upon those ideas, begin a conversation, or simply listen in to the conversation.  The conversations are mostly public within the company, but the tool gives the ability to create private groups where sensitive conversations can stay within a department or a team without being viewable by the entire corporation.  Once I asked the crowd where I could find the latest corporate PowerPoint template.  Within minutes someone I had never met responded with an intranet link to the answer.

You cannot underestimate the power of "working out loud" with social tools.  So many conversations get trapped in the one on one world of email and instant messaging.  With open sharing, new ideas emerge, experts are found, and teams are formed from the groundswell.  Serendipity happens when conversations become public and others are encouraged to listen and contribute their ideas, all within the safety of the company walls. 

Yammer is onto something big.  Microsoft recognizes that they need to make an acquisition to become relevant in this space and the deal is done.  All we need now is to get confirmation that this is indeed happening.  [update 6/25: It's official.  See the press release]

You can follow more emerging coverage on this handy Google Doc being composed by the crowd.

Your eNewsletter is Old School

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I still get many e-newsletters in my inbox. Many of them have very good content, but I am finding that I get more and more frustrated with the lack of social integration. I receive something interesting, I want share it with my network. If I were "old school", I would just forward that email to all my friends...yuck.

So I look for the share features that are starting to emerge. I received one recently that had a link to share it on twitter. I clicked it and got a twitter window with a very cryptic preformatted tweet (ugly headline, shortened URL, and a hashtag ad for the newsletter platform)...double yuck.

It got me thinking...as I look at these e-newsletters that were all the rage just 5 years ago, it is painfully obvious to me that it is time for these companies to "get social". I'd like to share some strategy and tactics just in case you find your e-marketing method "old school" and are longing for a way to break out and get social in 2011.

Here is my short list of recommendations. These were created with an event management company in mind, but probably translate well to anyone using e-mail marketing to promote their organization.

1. Leverage your e-newsletter into a ongoing twitter campaign
2. Build a community with your audience using a microblogging tool (maybe from Socialcast) and a community platform (maybe from Jive)
3. Update your website and communications with various "share" features (see this example blog)
4. Utilize YouTube and Flickr to share the excitement of your events with your audience
5. Encourage blogging from and about your events
6. Add a twitter hashtag to every event and promote it in all literature and communications. Register it on what the hashtag
7. Utilize a wiki to crowd source and then archive tweets, blogposts, and user generated content about your events

If you would like to expand on these recommendations, share example best practices, or just add you 2 cents, please tweet it or comment below.

Let's make a resolution to drop the "old school" e-marketing tactics of the 2000s and move full speed into the "new school" social media tactics of the 2010s.