Do you remember where you were when you first heard about Quora? I posed this question to a few ad agency social media aficionados — people such agencies paid good money to stay on top of the latest trends in such technology — and no one had a good answer.
OK, the creation of Quora may not be a JFK assassination-type memory for most, but you have to wonder why these people spend so many of their waking hours hunched over laptops or smartphones closely monitoring Google Rea der or their various Twitter feeds. What kind of news do they expect to see?
It turns out that the news is more drips and drabs — a Foursquare update here and a tweak to Facebook Groups there — than anything off-the-charts exciting, but such is the life of an agency social media person.
Keeping track of those incremental changes is challenging. Since social media is still relatively new, there are few industry-standard ways to monitor or measure any of it. None of the people contacted for this article keep track of social media developments the same way. "I don't think anyone has time to sit down and say 'this is my social media following strategy,'" says James Cooper, chief creative innovation officer at JWT. "You just go on and start looking at stuff."
In other words, there are a lot of ways to skin a social media cat. Nevertheless, here are seven tried-and-true methods to stay on top of the trends:
- 1. RSS. Mike Proulx, senior...
