As the way in which people get information changes—shifting away from print and broadcast TV and toward the Internet, social networks, cable TV, e-readers, and other forms—those of us in the business of gathering, evaluating, and disseminating that information have, I will admit, struggled sometimes to keep up.
Take Twitter, for example. As the, shall we say, senior member of our team, I'm pretty much a Twitilliterate, to coin a word. Fortunately, I have staff members who are more than comfortable with tweets, and as a result, we've slowly but steadily built a following. So, too, with Facebook. We may not draw huge numbers, but we're doing OK. And our iPhone/iPad and Android apps are catching on, while our website continues to draw a crowd, thanks in large part to regular news feeds and to our roster of knowledgeable bloggers. We'll be doing monthly webcasts soon, and the video offerings on our DCV-TV website provide a wide variety of interesting takes on logistics, material handling, and supply chain issues.
If each of these helps us reach our target audience—that's you, dear reader—that's good. But it certainly presents its challenges. Like most of our readers, we may not have all the resources we would like to manage all of the above. In fact, now that I look back at the preceding paragraph, I'm left a bit breathless at how far we've come since our launch in 2003, when we offered a print magazine—one of which I remain fiercely proud—and a pretty static website.
Why should all this matter to you? Well, it's because we work hard to understand your business information needs and to offer that information in whatever format seems most appropriate and in whatever ways you want to receive it.
Thus, when the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) holds its annual conference in Philadelphia from Oct. 2-5, we'll tweet updates on what we see, post news stories on our website on the most significant events, offer video interviews with some of CSCMP's leaders and conference attendees, and provide information on the conference in a pre-event e-newsletter and a post-event wrap-up e-mail to subscribers. (Several staff members will also be directly involved in our sister publication's track, "CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly Presents," a series of discussions on key supply chain issues like risk and sustainability.) And, oh yes, we'll offer ample coverage in print as well.
I don't know what's next (though I suspect The Cloud will have something to do with it), but we will embrace whatever it may be if it helps us provide you with useful and timely and pertinent business information. Just don't expect me to tweet any time soon.
