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How do you stay informed on technology and IT trends?
Which blogs, news outlets, or Twitter accounts are best to follow for staying up-to-date?
High-quality answers will be included in a handbook for technology marketers produced by Focus.
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10 Answers
By participating in Focus.com, of course! There are lots of smart business and technology people in the Focus community and they share a wealth of information. And the webinars (RIP...) and roundtables are very good sources of information. Obviously there are other forums out there, but I put Focus at the top of the list.
Like Mike and Dennis, I spend a lot of time reading industry journals, white papers, commentaries and blogs. And I participate in a lot of analyst and vendor-sponsored webinars and seminars. I would love to be able to attend more trade shows, but those are both time consuming and expensive. I'm on a lot of mailing lists so I often receive free passes to the exhibition halls. Spending face time with the various companies is a good way to learn firsthand about their products and strategies.
I personally maintain a "watch list" of approximately 100 companies who I think are key players in different sectors. I use a mind mapping tool to capture and categorize the companies and I can include links to their website and lots of notes and collateral information about their products.
I've also spent time following different industry notables such as Robert Scoble and his Building 43 video series. He's got an interesting "in your face" approach to interviewing startup companies that many times provides insights you won't find in the traditional trade journals.
An avid writer, I maintain several blogs, have written numerous white papers, and try to answer lots of questions here on Focus. I've found that this motivates me to stay as current as possible on a wide variety of subjects.
I also like to "get my hands dirty" with different technologies. As I mentioned, I maintain several blogs and websites, so I've learned a lot about web development, HTML and HTML5, CSS, PHP, mySQL, Javascript, etc. I've even developed a website that does photo manipulation so I could learn about JPEG processing and how to use the Facebook OpenGraph APIs.
Finally, I try to maintain close contact with the VC community, offering to provide insight and analysis on different portfolio companies. This can "get you in the door" on some early stage startups and you can meet some really smart people.
And then there's the old "keep your ear to the ground" approach to try to figure out what's coming next!
In addition to the obvious analyst groups, consulting firms, and trade publications, I rely greatly on my social media contacts. Yes, Focus is one sources, but the vast majority of my access to new content is provided by Twitter. In fact, it is more than I can consume.
It’s easy to stay informed these days with all the online news portals and social networking forums, but from an analyst’s perspective, it’s really important to keep in touch with marketing organizations at companies within the industry you follow. These may be internal folks or could be outside PR teams that handle communications with analysts and writers. Marketing managers will alert you to announcements and contact you for briefings often before the news is generally released to the public, making it possible to formulate questions and get the additional information you need to be prepared to write or blog as soon as the news is official.
Good ways to stay informed:
1) Keep in regular touch with marketing organizations at companies in your industry.
2) Find and subscribe to or follow online news portals within your industry.
3) Regularly attend webinars and conferences/tradeshows relevant to your industry.
In igoogle.com I have rss feeds to the major tech online magazines like: pcmag, ontechies, wired etc. It's easy to see the top stories each day that way.
In terms of following the latest IT trends, IT World provides firsthand news on the latest technology. Once on the site, it also provides links to other news which you are keen on. Subscribing to Google Alert also provides news on the latest updates in the markets. There is a range of products which you can subscribe to and the link sources range from Business Insider to PCWorld to CNET etc, all of which are reliable source of IT news.
In terms of research - latest figures, analysis and recommendations - why certain trends are taking place and what will be pushed out or pushed forward as a result of certain developments, Gartner, Forrester, Nielson, IDG Connect, Trade Pub and eMarketer are good sources of information. Their topics are varying - from mobile and tablet technologies, network development, touch screen technology, databases development, you have got it.
Gartner provides quarterly papers on the latest mobile devices figures worldwide so it is a good reference and many other news content providers use them as a reference in their news reports. This goes the same for Forrester and Nielson. There was a white paper by Forrester on the latest BI vendors - how they rated them and it was recommended by quite a number of other news sources. Nielson is also a name that appears on news frequently as their figures are also often quoted. EMarketer focuses more towards providing a marketing perspectives towards the latest trends so for those who are more into marketing, give it a look.
I like scanning the trade rags (both online and paper form) and using Google searches when looking for a specific technology to research.
Mike
Reading emails from vendors I follow. Trade magazines. Social networking like Twitter. Webinars. Trade shows.
Good comments Robert. I get my hands dirty too but from a 35,000 foot view - Architecture and BI (Business Intelligence). I play in the Cloud virtually.
All great comments. We all appear to use multiple/similar things to gather information.
I have a simple strategy:
I search for the top influencers in KLOUT (http://klout.com/) in fields I am interested in, and add them to my twitter stream.
This way I can quickly change my interests, while keeping the best sources available.
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