Keeping Up the Pace
One of the other interns in the office recently wrote about the Smart conference at UNC- Chapel Hill. She gave some great insight on what the conference discussed. It was a great time and I really hope they have more conferences at UNC about social media.
I wanted to share my thoughts on what Jeff Cohen talked about in his opening keynote. He focused on what the social media world was like in 2007, when most of us had just started college. The social landscape has changed so much in a short amount of time. We are graduating from college in a different online world than the one we started in.
Instead of talking about the change in the tools themselves, I want to discuss the challenge of keeping up with the constant changes. Â When we graduate, we have to be on top of our game. I have been joining social media sites as soon as they start like Jumo, Living Social, Groupon and Quora. I have also begun following social media news sites like Mashable, Tech Crunch and Social Media Examiner.
I have welcomed the new sites with open, yet skeptical, arms. I don’t automatically love every new site that comes up but I feel it is important to at least research the site and become familiar with it in the event that it could benefit you, your brand or your future employer.
As a part of Generation Y, we have more access and resources than our parents. We are almost all going to be working online at our jobs. If we do not stay current with the trends, we will not be keeping up with our peers and remaining competitive in the industry.
Does anyone else have any advice for staying up-to-date with new social media trends?
I think you have to sometimes wait and see what sticks and lasts. During the 2000 dot.com bubble we saw new companies with great promise pop up on a weekly basis, only to see most of them crash and burn. It became about making a quick buck on IPO versus providing value. And that is what it’s all about, providing value. You may have cool technology but does it provide value to users over time? Quora is a perfect example. Everyone on Twitter was yammering about it a month ago but that only represents a small percentage of the online audience. LinkedIn answers has a large user base of business people that find value in the answers as well as the networking aspect. Will Quora last? We’ll have to wait and see but I would be hesitant to go there and spend too much time on it in case it does not. I don’t see many people talking about it now so the “new car smell” has worn off.