Emerging Media Trends

Recently I attended a PR Newswire Emerging Media panel discussion with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club, and BlueArc’s Louis Gray.  The event was well attended by local PR and marketing folks looking for advice on how to marshal the growing array of social media tools to effectively reach potential customers and the ideas shared by the panel did not disappoint.  Objectively speaking, I think as an agency we are doing a good job of keeping up with social media trends (and even earning some kudos in the process) since training all of our staff earlier this year, but here are a few tidbits from the session that stood out to me.

The group agreed on the importance of using RSS for distributing content, but also stressed how easy it is to monitor perceptions of our clients (and our own agency) in the market by setting up Google Alerts and a Twitter search feed, both of which are RSS-compatible.

Distribution to mobile devices will also become more important as iPhone, Blackberry and other devices continue to gain popularity.  With that in mind, marketing staff should be aware of mobile users’ experience of their corporate websites and consider creating a mobile version of the site.  Wordpress, for example, offers a mobile template for blogs built on their platform.

A recording of the session can be found here.  It’s definitely worth a listen.