Saturday, November 21, 2009

Keeping Up

Are you keeping up? There is not only a plethora of information available, but the amount of information is ever increasing and is often untidy. In order to keep up with new information on in our areas of work, we must become technically adept at managing the flow of information through using appropriate and customized tools and constantly adjusting the way we managed the flow. We must learn to “drink from the fire hose” by deciding our own filters, not being reliant on old technology nor on only one technology. Also, we don’t want to become dependent on only one source or one authority for information. 

As professionals, we don’t want to get caught not knowing our industry—information and knowledge in our area of expertise and passion.

“Today, if you're not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies' impact on business, then you're just not staying current. Period.”  Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb

The tools allow us to stay relevant if we focus on using the tools to engage and build relationships that help us accomplish our goals. Staying engaged means you know if and how you are effective.

“Friends, it (social media) keeps us relevant.” Andy Kleinschmidt

Keeping up means using different technologies to keep up with the flow of information and beginning engaged in communities that are important to us and our organization.

Using all in one applications like Tweetdeck helps. But, we also need to understand feeds—Atom feeds and RSS feeds. Managing feeds to keep the information flowing to us by using a feed reader, like Google Reader or Netvibes, and incorporating feeds into existing sites is a must in drinking from that fire hose.

Photo: Keeping Up. Originally uploaded by Picture Taker 2

This post was taken in part from Ideas for Social Media Strategy by Anne Mims Adrian, Rhonda Conlon, and Jerry Thomas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.slideshare.net/aafromaa.

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