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

The Upside Down Enterprise Portal

TweetA new type of “citizen editor” is emerging, becoming a trusted source of curated content on the web.

I’m a curator of news. Like many people, I use twitter to gather the latest in technology opinions and developments. My particular interest is Social Business and Mobile gadgetry. Other people follow photography, sports, science or one of any variety of focused niche topics out on the web.

When we find something interesting, we retweet (RT) it to our Twitter followers or share it with our Facebook friends. Sometimes we send it as is, other times we add a commentary and pass it on. Most of the time, we are tweeting links (URLs) to other content. We are sending “pointers,” so to speak, to content that we find interesting on the web. Over time, we gather a following and become a valuable editor or curator of the news. Some turn it into a business like Mashable or Engadget. Others just do it as a hobby and use their “passion” to build relationships with like minded people or those wanting to learn more about that particular subject.

This model of curating information has turned the traditional media on its head. Gone are the days when a few powerful editors of the major print and television news outlets decide what the world should know. Do you remember the days before CNN when just three broadcast networks decided what to share with the public every night on the evening news? Times are certainly different now with many varying outlets to source our information. The real value comes when our “social network” shares what they feel is relevant. A new type of “citizen editor” is emerging, becoming a trusted source of curated content on the web.

On a typical day, I will monitor twitter feeds early and late in the day to catch up on the events, attitudes, and happenings. I have become efficient with the RT (retweet) as a means to share what I am learning. In fact this innate desire to share is driving the explosive growth of the social web.

Twitter has the “ReTweet”, Facebook has the “Like”, and Google just recently announced the “+1”. In fact if you look around, the ability to share is everywhere on the social web. Aging systems have the "email only" share choice, but modern software is being fitted with increasingly sophisticated share mechanisms that make it easy to share relevant content with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and a host of other groups.

On my iPad, applications like Zite, Pulse, and even Murdoch's The Daily all build in native functionality to share content that the reader finds interesting. YouTube even does it, but still ignores the "tweet this" option. It really is a new way to promote content and get the word out, taking advantage of the clout and credibility of friends or colleagues to share content that they find interesting within their social circle. Content goes "viral" quickly and takes on a life of its own when friends share it with friends.

So, where am I going with this? I had the "Aha!" moment recently as I was at the office reading news stories from the corporate intranet. I found a great story and wanted to share it with my corporate colleagues (aka followers). The familiar share button I always find on the public web was missing. Why don't we build this share capability into today’s enterprise portal? This new way of the emerging “citizen editor” can be applied to the corporate intranet as a means to share content relevant to the employee masses. It can be done much more effectively than the old Network News model when Corporate Communications comes up with slick stories and pushes it on all the employees.

This “secret sauce” of the modern intranet embraces the same concept. Abandon the old push model and embrace the “citizen editor” or “employee curator” concept as a means to share news and make stories and messages go viral in your company. Engagement goes up, good ideas spread, and information is quickly shared within a healthy collaborative culture.

Do you like the idea? Below is a straw man proposal to consider as you go through the next redesign of your corporate intranet.

Tomorrow's Social Intranet environment should have the following basic building blocks:

• Self Service Employee profile with IM presence
• Microblogging function (See Rawn Shah's Forbes post)
• Ability to follow / friend a colleague
• Corporate and user generated news feeds / articles
• Blogging platform
• Wiki platform (for collaborative authoring)

To make it truly social, add these advanced sharing (curation) abilities:

• Share ideas (tweets) internally with followers / colleagues / or the entire company
• Tweets should include any content on the intranet or internet
• Share button built into all content pages
• Metrics to track number of shares for each piece of content
• Most popular content is automatically featured on the portal home page

To make this content truly accessible it should be available on various form factors:

• Desktop / laptop access for all functions
• VPN remote access for all functions
• Mobile access on all popular platforms (Android, iOS, RIM, …) for limited functions such as news, microblogging, email, calendar, alerts
• Mobile access on employee’s personal devices

Finally along with the technology, there needs to be an equal or greater effort paid to the cultural change needed for a culture of collaboration, trust, authenticity, and transparency.

We are a few years into a revolution of content sharing and creation on the social web. It is only a matter of time before employees demand the same functionality within their corporate intranets. The smart communications officer will see the future being played out on the social web and begin to implement it within the enterprise today.

What do you think? Do you have examples where forward thinking enterprises are doing this already? Do you agree that this is the future? Or do you have another view. Please add your view in the comments below or in your tweets, shares and +1s.