In times past, you could read a few journals, go to a couple of conferences and be pretty confident that you were on top of things. At least in the scientific community. And if you published in the right peer-reviewed journals, or delivered a couple of conference papers, you were certain to be cited, and you kept your credibility as a player.

But the world has changed: It’s no longer enough to be seen at Conference (in whatever field, though I’m thinking about the Water NZ Conference in New Zealand) and even to sponsor a tote-bag or award. Now you have to have a presence in cyberspace. You need to be seen/heard over the clamour of hundreds of other voices, some more controversial and therefore more shareable and more likely to Go Viral.

How do you stay on top?

1) Accept that it costs money and time.  The thing is to discipline yourself to limiting the amount of time you spend trolling online and getting the best bang for your buck. You don’t have to go to every conference and you don’t have to read every post or tweet any more than you have to read every email. There are ways to maximise the cost/benefit.

2)  Conferences are expensive, whether you are putting up a stand in the expo hall, delivering a paper, chairing a session, or attending as a delegate.  The most valuable time for gathering new ideas and keeping your own profile visible, is by networking with the movers and shakers during tea breaks, or around the stands.  So you should choose the conference you’re going to invest time and money in, by who is going to be there – not by the interesting titles on the programme.  That generally means the big industry conference, not the scientific and specialty conferences.  In our subject field this means the Water NZ annual conference and the Trade & Industrial Waste Forum conference.

3) Participate in online forums.  Here’s a NZ example, the New Zealand Trade and Industrial Waste Forum:  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/New-Zealand-Trade-Industrial-Waste-4484284   You have to be a member to post on most of these forums, but you can usually see the threads beforehand so you can decide whether it’s worth investing your time in.  Check when the last post was: if it’s more than a couple of weeks ago, it might not be active enough. Once you have decided on this, you really do need to contribute or it all falls over, and the forum can’t keep going. There are some more Water forums here http://forum.waternz.org.nz/index.php

4) Facebook, Twitter and other Social media can be a great time waster, but they are also the place to keep yourself in the loop.  How can you reduce the time wasted and maximise the networking?  Accept that there will be a lot of stuff coming through your “feed” that you won’t spend time reading – just scan and pick out the worthwhile posts from their headings (a reminder that if you are posting, use good  titles and/or first few words).  It is better to have to scan through some dross and be sure you’re not missing the pearls,  than to cull too severely the Pages or Tweeters you follow.  But be disciplined about limiting the time, and do it in your natural downtime, not your premium concentration work time.  For me the time just after lunch, when my concentration is at its lowest, is the time to clear email and scan the Facebook page’s News feed.

5) Use Current Awareness tools.  If you belong to an organisation that still has the luxury of a library, with real librarians, get them to do an online search of the relevant databases in your field.  Give them heaps of keywords at the beginning, and give them lots of feedback about the results, and you won’t get a whole lot of irrelevant stuff, but you won’t miss the pearls either.  The librarian may even get excited about your pet subject and keep a look out in all kinds of media.

If you don’t have this luxury, you can do a periodic search yourself through your own public library databases, or at least through Google Scholar *(Ask me how if you don’t know).  This means you don’t have to scan huge numbers of journals but you can keep up with developments in your field.  The peer review process doesn’t guarantee either the accuracy or the relevancy of the articles themselves, but they are more likely to be scientifically rigorous than what you might read in a trade journal.  And you can just search for what a particular person or company is putting out in both patents and papers.

The main thing is not to get overwhelmed by the flood of stuff: ride it like a surfer, and keep on top.

This posting is by Kate Young, BPO Ltd.  The opinions expressed are personal and not necessarily the position of BPO Ltd.