There's no shortage of apps to help aggregate and serve up news and information on important topics. A decade or so ago, this might have been more of a challenge. But today, it’s easily done through a host of services, and even some features baked right into our smartphones.

One of my favorite places to catch up on news and articles related to my interests is Google Discover. It’s only a swipe away from the homescreen on my TCL 20 Pro 5G. Discover gives me all the important stories that are relevant to me.

Discover is amazing. It’s a highly personalized feed of articles based on topics I care about, which Google determines from the sites I’m visiting and the queries I’m searching for. In most cases, my Discover feed is pretty spot on. Plus, I can easily control what I’m seeing just by tapping on the icons that can show me more or less content on any topic.

What I love most about Discover is it’s simplicity:

It’s just a swipe away on my Android phone. No extra app or login is needed.
It’s always up-to-date, surfacing content that’s related to what I’m interested in that week or that same day.

My other source for quick access to news on the go is Twitter. I don’t have time to visit individual publications I’m a fan of, so I subscribe to these outlets’ Twitter feeds to keep a pulse on their latest stories.

Essentially, I’m using Twitter as a modern RSS reader to get the latest posts from the publishers I love.

Relying mostly on these two services have served me well. However, on a recent vacation this summer I experienced something unusual. I had something that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while—downtime.

It was bliss, thanks to limited TV, cutting off work notifications, and having time to catch up on everything that’s important to me.

What I found was that the two primary sources I’ve come to rely on for keeping a pulse on the world around me just didn’t cut it.

Google Discover didn’t provide the volume of content that would help me feel caught up on all the things I’m passionate about. Rather it was really good at providing me with a somewhat limited window into recent info or what I had only recently researched online.

Twitter presented the opposite problem with way too much information. Constant tweets and that firehose of content means it’s never quite able to serve up the stories I want, when I want them. There are simply too many tweets for Twitter to make sense of and deliver in a focused way. It’s fine for killing time while waiting in line at a coffee house, but less useful when you’re dedicating more time to staying informed.

There are great topics and groups I subscribe to on Twitter. The Marketing topic, for example, is great and introduces me to new marketing folks. But the content of the posts have no real consistency, and they’re rarely enriching. Lately, it seems like there’s more marketing inspiration and quotes rather than anything really actionable.

In that moment of disconnectedness on vacation, I turned to an app on my phone I had not touched in many, many years: Feedly. I had used Feedly in the heyday of Feedburner and other tools that helped manage RSS feeds.

What I found was that Feedly was alive and well, and vastly improved. Still powered by the magic of RSS, Feedly was able to keep me up to date with the topics and trends I really cared about, without the limited or overwhelming presentation I found on Google Discover or Twitter, respectively.

Publications can be easily organized into groups. From there, I was able to see all the latest stories from those groupings and individual topics.

Feedly was perfect for my vacation mindset; it was efficient, it was current, it was actually enjoyable. From Marketing news, to Design & UX inspiration, to ideas on the best meals to cook when I got back home, Feedly allowed me to get easily immersed in all the stuff I love.

The information age is great and all, but sometimes there’s just too much information (or disinformation) to track. Feedly was useful in helping me keep a pulse on the topics that I cared about the most when I first used it back in 2008. I’m glad to see that it’s still around and doing exactly what it does best: making it easy to organize, read, and share information.

If you haven’t tried Feedly, I highly recommend giving it a spin.

The Zero Moment of Truth is a term coined by Google that refers to online research performed by a consumer before they purchase a product or service. According Google, 88% of customers in the U.S. do online research on a product before they buy. This Zero Moment, or ZMOT, is changing the way marketers think about branding and online commerce.

Marketing used to revolve around the 3 to 5 seconds a consumer would spend deciding on a product while at the store shelf. It was the moment where all of a brand’s incessant advertising would payoff, in what Proctor & Gamble called the "First Moment of Truth", or FMOT. But technology has completely altered the way consumers decide on a product to buy.

Today, FMOT isn’t the only brand interaction that counts. Marketers have to consider ZMOT as much as they do traditional advertising. Consumers have infinite means available to research products: comparison-shopping websites, user-generated ratings & reviews, social media posts, and the list goes on. More importantly, they can perform their research anywhere — at home, at work, or while waiting in line at Starbucks — and it can be done in real-time.

No longer are consumers at the mercy of messages being pushed to them. The consumer is now largely in control, seeking out the information they need to decide on the product that will satisfy their specific wants and desires.

ZMOT poses new challenges for brands, but there are ways to optimize for these new interactions.

Start by thinking about the customer’s journey, especially the specific customer that you’re trying to reach. Research the types of questions they may ask at the start of their journey. This should lend insights into what content and messaging a brand should be communicating across ads, websites, and other touch points.
Consumers are using more than just a desktop computer. They’re also increasingly on the go and highly mobile, so brands need to make sure they have mobile-friendly content that consumers can consume on any device. Responsive design and other mobile-centric marketing are now essential.
It’s also important to understand that consumers are not waiting for a single advertisement to tell them what to do. They’re empowered and ready to do their research, so help them out by developing high-quality content around a product, such as blog posts, buying guides, comparison charts, and videos -- not just ads. Remember that engaging content is critical for establishing an emotional connection with consumers, and that emotional bond is fundamentally what ZMOT is all about.
Provide good customer service. Reviews matter at ZMOT. So, make sure your customers are happy, especially after the sale is complete. Find ways to encourage reviews and place positive ones front and center whenever possible.

Don’t forget to target people who have already shown interest in your brand. With remarketing, you can help establish brand loyalty and retention.These are just some of the high-level ways that brands can optimize for ZMOT.