As agencies and companies continue to shift their PR and marketing efforts to the digital side, it becomes more important to be able to keep up with your contacts. The social web tends to be a very, well, “What have you done for me lately?” sort of place, and in order to stay on top of things, PR/marketing professionals must monitor contacts’:

  • blog posts
  • tweets
  • Facebook posts
  • other comments

This can become rather tiresome, especially if one looks at it as work — that’s a different blog post altogether — but it’s something that must be done nonetheless.

Last month, I blogged my thoughts on lifestreaming, and how it is to become the future of the web. I believe a feed-like (as opposed to blog-like) lifestreaming service, FriendFeed, may be the key to streamlining one’s monitoring activities.

You might not see an immediate benefit to using FriendFeed. In fact, you may think, “This looks just like Twitter. And FriendFeed just got bought by Facebook.Why would I use it?” Here are three reasons why you should use FriendFeed:

1. FriendFeed, when used properly, compiles all digital activity in one place. Forming a deep digital relationship with your contacts take time, but if you read and respond to their blog posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, blog comments, Flickr photo posts and everything else, there’s a good chance your relationship will improve quickly.

FriendFeed compiles everything in an easily navigable stream, and it links directly to their posts. Just click through and respond, either on their FriendFeed page or — better yet — on the page itself.

2. Build your digital street cred. Many PR professionals are on Twitter. They’re not on FriendFeed yet; it still has that “geeky” early-adopter feel. If you’re on FriendFeed, and you use it to keep up with your contacts — not to mention make new ones — it makes you stand out.

3. Your good blog contacts are there. There’s a good chance that any blogger worth their salt is on FriendFeed. If your contacts are in the space, you should be there too. Period.

FriendFeed, in my mind, is the new RSS reader. If you use an RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) to keep up with your contacts, give FriendFeed a try. You can find me on FriendFeed here.