One of the best ways to keep abreast of the latest news and trends in the 3PL industry is to take advantage of the internet and the many different delivery methods available to you. No matter how you are in involved in the logistics industry you should be taking the time to keep yourself up to date with the latest 3PL news, trends and competitive activity. By investing less than 15-20 minutes a day in reading the right resources you can become more knowledgeable and effective at what you do.
5 Ways to Get Your 3PL News Fix
Email– Good old reliable email. It’s still the best way to reach most of us, and it is a great way to keep up to date with the latest 3PL industry news. Sign up for key industry email newsletters like Supply Chain Digest and newsletters from your favorite 3PL trade publications whether its Inbound Logistics or Traffic World. Of course don’t blindly sign up for newsletters (no reason for unwarranted spam), but do check out what your colleagues and other leaders in the industry read.
RSS Feeds – RSS is quickly becoming one of the most effective ways of filtering noise and effectively reading business information. Sign up for free services like Google Reader or Bloglines and subscribe to news feeds for a number of key sources like Logistics Management, prominent 3PL news bloggers like 3plwire.com and news aggregators like 3PLnews.com. And not to self promote but you can also subscribe to the logisticslist.com rss feed to get our latest posts sent directly to you.
Logistics Blogs – While almost all logistics bloggers have RSS feeds, sometimes people just like to bookmark their favorite ones and visit them once a week or month or so. There are definitely some great blogs out there like Eric Joiner’s FreightDawg and the infrequently updated but incredibly authoritative BlogonLog.
Social Networks – Most of you already know about LinkedIn (and if you don’t then I highly recommend you create an account). From a career & business development standpoint, LinkedIn is a highly effective way to do deeper research into companies you may want to work with and provides insight into their experience and how long their employees have been with the company, tenure etc..
Logistics Magazines – If all this technology stuff doesn’t do it for you, then I suggest you go back to where it all started and subscribe to leading logistics trade magazines still available in print form. Its also worth mentioning that most of the best print trade publications typically also have accompanying websites.