commbasics

Saturday I received an email from Gary Katz on the issue of marketing apathy.  The email was a marketing tool to boost a class he is teaching at the UC extension in Sunnyvale, but he makes valid points about the need for bringing real professionalism to marketing in the Silicon Valley. I'm posting the email in entirety here because there may be some marketing people out there who actually realize that marketing in the SiliValley is done primarily by marketing amateurs, not professionals; by engineers looking for a path the to C-level office using marketing as a stepping stone. And if any of you do realize that and really want to make a difference, then taking a class like Gary's might be your first step toward making that difference. Dear Lou   Yesterday, I posed the following question in LinkedIn Answers and, some 24 hours later, have yet to receive a single answer: How important is Marketing Operations as a distinct discipline inside your organization? Is it that no ...

I love Jon Stewart and the Daily Show.  There, I admit it.  I even "made" my teenage son watch it for political education.  Oh, I don't necessarily agree with his politics, but I love how he consistently takes the press to task for giving up their authority and responsibility.   He did it again yesterday at the Dem Convention in a meeting with print reporters. One of the reasons the press has lost advertising revenue is because people no longer believe they are relevant.  In many ways that's true because they gave up that relevance to television and the blogosphere. They go, hat in hand, to potential advertisers and discount their value with unprofitable rates with the hope the advertiser will buy a banner ad on the home page and they cut the newsroom staff so they can afford the rate cuts.  And the information vacuum left is getting filled with blogs. Check the history.  The decline of print media began long before the concept of bl...

Just got a note from Dylan McGrath.   "I'm back as West Coast Online editor starting Monday. I am not going to have a specific beat, but will be focused on the Web site." It's nice get back one of the losses.  Welcome back Dylan.  

Got a hot rumor today and I'm working on confirming it.  Dylan McGrath who left EE Times a couple of years ago to take an internal position at Autodesk, has come back.  Some of the rumors say he's come back to cover EDA, but that doesn't make a lot of sense since Techinsights recently decided to pull EDA news into the EDA DesignLine.  I know Mark Lapedus has been overwhelmed in covering the semiconductor industry all by his lonesome and Dylan was splitting some of that duty with Mark before he left, so that combination makes sense. But EE Times has also been looking to replace Junko Yoshida who is scheduled to return to covering world news and trends.  So it's possible they may have found Junko's replacement internally and Dylan is being brought in to fill that empty spot. If this is true, it's good news for the electronics industry.  Dylan was always a prolific, approachable and engaged journalist.  I just hope he doesn't burn o...

Anyone checking out Jeremiah Owyang's s ocial media news diges t?  It's pretty damn good.  A few weeks ago Jeremiah stated he thinks analysts are morphing into journalists as they have closer connections with the industry players and he's working hare to prove the point on his own blog. Like IdaRose, I'm not sure it's true but reading Jeremiah's stuff is very educational.

This wasn't going to be the first in this series, but  that pos Jason Pontin got my juices flowing in his column today on authentic communication, or lack of it, in social media. He writes: "Social-media Jason Pontin, in short, is a function of my business life. I know that this identity is inauthentic, because there is so much about which I do not post or blog. Do other habitual users of social media, whose social identities are as carefully constructed to attract attention, but who blog and post about everything (and thus feel no alienation), not know that those identities are inauthentic? Bemused by the difference between themselves and their social-media selves, are they mere Copies, cast from a few popular molds, endlessly reproduced among false friends?" Yes, that may be true, but then it was also true of the print-media Jason and the web-media Jason.  It's also true of the trade show Jason, the featured speaker Jason, the father Jason, the husband Jaso...

So the big news in EDA is the failure of the hostile takeover of Mentor by Cadence .  Two things are worth discussing here.  Number one is that Cadence withdrew the offer, not unlike Microsoft withdrawing the bid for Yahoo.  When Cadence first looked at Mentor's numbers it looked pretty good.  Tight, yes, but good.  But after further study, deliberation and skinning the cat multiple ways for Mentor, they decided it wasn't worth it.  Second, Mentor originally said they were going to fight it tooth and nail, but when Cadence quit the field they said, "Wait, we didn't say ABSOLUTELY no." and are acting like spurned lovers. What is notable here is we are talking about the number one (or two depending on what quarter) and three companies in an industry populated by hundreds of competitors who decided the business isn't worth going for a definite number one spot; that they can't see a market big enough to make a merged company profit...

As I tweeted last week, I went in to talk to a tech company today that is seriously considering throwing real resources at social media.  That statement, in itself, is pretty damn amazing.  It must be pretty painful for someone in the semiconductor industry to actually consider doing it and doing it right. This company is what I would consider the poster child for what is happening to high tech marketing. They have GREAT technology and a solid customer base.  Yet their revenue sucks and their stock is in the toilet because the technology hasn't been necessary... until now.  Like everyone else, they have been cutting marketing costs for almost a decade, thinking that eliminating a cost center will help the bottom line.  What it has given them is a media that is no longer interested in their story, even though now is the time it would actually provide real value.  So even if customers are willing to talk about them, there is no one to listen. The financia...

Gartner analysts Anthony Bradley and Nikos Drakos have come out with a report identifying the benefits of social media , on the heals of announcements from several banks that they are banning the use of tools like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  The analysts say the collaborative possibilities of the sites increase productivity so much that it overwhelms what might be seen as wasting time at work. I know I've been late to the party when it came to adopting these tools.  I've had a MySpace page simply to maintain a connection with my kids and their circle of friends (Hey, Jon's Dad is cool, he has a Myspace), and reluctantly joined FaceBook (I wrote in the status several months ago that I was wondering what value it had).   Since then, I've been able to use it to make business connections outside of the EDA and Fabless areas my business has focused on for years.  I've been able to share ideas quickly and easily with colleagues, find old friends and...

Conservative columnist Debra Saunders revealed today that the SF Chronicle is offering buyouts to another 125 workers.  No word on how that affects the newsroom, but it's the latest evidence that the decline of print media has not hit bottom yet. Debra goes through all the reasons why people think the decline ain't all that bad for society because there is so much information and news available for free on the web, but she also points out something that I've been preaching for a while, i.e. that the valuable, objective content on the web actually comes from print media. The largest source of information retrieved on the 'net still comes from the New York Times, according to all the sites that cover that kind of stuff.  In fact the top sites on the net all belong to print media.  So if print goes away, and it is, all you have left for news are press releases. That's why we started New Tech Press; a way to create real news content without being dependent...

It's getting really busy lately.  A bunch of VCs have asked me to come in and talk with portfolio clients about social media (I'm gonna have to start charging for this stuff) and I've been approached by two other companies about comprehensive communication strategies.  I guess something is sinking in.  Not in EDA and semiconductors, but it's happening elsewhere. And that brings me back to my post last week about EE Times.   Brian Fuller took another step if describing the value of the new format and he points out that getting in the magazine is going to be more difficult ... if all you want to do is get a product announcement. I've said it before: It's no longer 1999.  Back then, everything about computers, the internet, the web, consumer electronics, etc. was bright, shiny and mysterious.  Anyone who had anything to say about every little technology could be covered in depth.  The media was vibrant enough to give that kind of coverage.  But then, only 10 perce...