commbasics

I missed this article in Fast Company last January.  It was about how the Monty Python crew responded to illegal uploads of their video clips.  Rather than get litigious, the up loaded their own versions in high quality, categorized and in their own channel... for free.  The upside is the effort increased DVD sales 23,000 percent. I'll repeat that, because it bears repeating. 23,000 percent! You want to know what the ROI of social media is?  You want to understand why giving up control is a good idea? You really need to adjust your thinking to something "completely different."

I just finished four days of audio podcast recording at the 2009 Design Automation Conference and, in accordance with my contrarian nature, I thought there were a lot of good things.  Let's look, first, at the numbers.  Officially, they are up, but they don't add up, and when you look at the show floor you know things were going south.  I talked to 10 companies, who didn't want to be quoted, who admitted that if thing don;t turn around in 6-9 months, they will not be back at DAC next year. And yet, in all of that there was hope.   Bob Gardner of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium talked to me briefly about the changes they will be making in promoting the show.  The details were sketchy but just the fact that they are looking at doing something different ... anything different ... is a move in the right direction.  The DAC committee worked hard to present some new and interesting "knowledge niches" in the conference (tha...

A couple of weeks ago I reported on Hearst laying off Murray Slovick and said I would follow up to see if there were any other losses.  One of my readers, who I only know as Industry Maven, said there were a bunch more.  And Hearst's Bill Barron popped up today to point out I hadn't followed through on checking out the details.   And that's my bad.   What I did find out was that, at least for Electronic Products and the publications I normally deal with, Murray was the only editorial casualty.  Most of what was let go was support and advertising personnel.  What it looks like was Hearst made the decision to cut back on support staff and keep feet-on-the-ground editorial, which is commendable in this day and time.  I could find no support for the contention that entire publications had been dumped. Sorry to have dropped the ball, Bill

Real interesting first day at DAC.  Free Monday seemed to bring people out of the woodwork in the morning  and traffic seemed to die out after lunch, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the DAC committee's part.  The DAC Pavilion was generally filled whenever I wandered by and the organization is trying mightily to deal with the issue of what to call bloggers.  Essentially the philosophy is a work in progress but there are some cutbacks.  John Cooley was "upset" that there was no food in the press room, but other than Paul Dempsey and John Donovan it looked like we could all cut back on the pastries. I could have had a full access pass if I asked for one, but I only needed to get interview rooms so I saw no need... even though the bag would have matched my orange tie as Georgian Marzsalek pointed out.  Some members of the press were upset that the default access was exhibits only, but as I have said, we all have to be flexible in the...

Covering the Design Automation Conference without limitation. The Design Automation Conference kicks off tonight with the EDAC reception.  I'm going to the conference this year for the first time as a registered member of the press.  How this happened has been well documented and discussed over the past few weeks and will continue to be, but I've said enough about that.  What I haven't talked about is the why. When I began my career as a professional communicator, it was in the form of a print journalists for weekly and daily newspapers.  The biggest difference I've seen between then and now, is the reliance on news releases as the beginning of news stories.  30 years ago, news releases were only for filler.  When you were laying out the paper, and you had three inches of space, you through in a rewritten news release.  You NEVER EVER printed a news release verbatim in any form.  EVER! What made up the core of coverage was ...

A comment on an earlier post today stated that there were few journalists sitting in the technical sessions of ISSCC because the "lacked the technical depth" to be able to competently report on the subject matter.  Frankly, that kind of attitude really honks me off.  So just for the heck of it, I took 5 minutes looking up the bios of a handful of journalists that cover EDA and semiconductors. Nic Mokhoff of EE Times has a BSEE and has been covering computer technology and research since 1985. Paul Dempsey of EDA Tech Forum  has twenty years as a technology and financial journalist and is the main US correspondent for for UK’s Institution of Engineering & Technology  Ronald Wilson of EDN wa s a design engineer for Tektronix, Inc. developing bus interfaces and participating in processor- and graphics-engine architecture and design, as well as evaluation engineering and software-driver development. He's been covering technology for more...

OK, so my last post kicked up a lot of dust over my comment about rewriting press releases.  See the above headline. When I rewrite something for a client, I intend to make it better, clearer, less fluffy.  I learned to do that kind of writing/editing from 10 years as a daily journalist.  When a traditional journalist rewrites a press release, he screens out as much crap as he can before publishing it in a very abbreviated form.  Usually that includes erasing the quote from a CEO saying how "pleased" he is.  When a blogger rewrites a press release, he does the same editing as a traditional journalist, and then adds perspective, which is what traditional journalists used to be able to do. Then there are traditional journalists and bloggers who don't even look at press releases before the write a story.  They do research and interviews to get a broad picture and write in-depth articles for major national publications.  We call those ...

Gabe Moretti chimed into the discussion on whether bloggers are journalists this week and made some valid statements, although I don't entirely agree with him.  Essentially he says that the only people who should get press credentials at a trade show should be people from the traditional press and that all others should be given a secondary level of access that is no more than exhibitor level.  I don't necessarily disagree with that, because the only reason I'm going to DAC to do interviews for EDA Cafe, SoC Central and New Tech Press is because I don't have to pay to get in.  I would have been happy with an exhibitor badge, but I will make use of the press pass to dig stuff up and get a quiet place to record interviews. However, I'm not real happy with the idea of keeping a hard and fast definition for who gets a press pass. I'm not sure Gabe realizes it, but by his definition, he should not get a press pass.  Gabe doesn't work for th...

Here's something to think about.   Suzanne Deffree at EDN tweeted yesterday that she took a couple of days off and came home to fine over 800 valid emails waiting for her (not viagra spam).  She first wondered if she was "super popular" but then realized that the missives were from PR people desperately searching for journalists to write about their latest widget update (note, Semicon is going this week and DAC in two weeks). So what happens when the journalists still employed find their inboxes tripling in volume?  You probably start getting lost, even if you have a good relationship with them. Another tweet from JL Gray was asking what to do with PR meeting requests, so the age of Blogolism is finally getting traction in the EDA world, and just in time.  Hardly any press left.  That should take some of the burden off the press, but maybe engineers will start finding out just how bad engineers are as communicators.

It's been a while since I reported a major loss to the electronics industry journalism ranks, but I got an email from Murray Slovick, Editorial Director of Electronic Products today.  He caught the second wave of layoffs out the door from Hearst Business Publications. Murray had been at Hearst since getting his leaving United Business Media where he ran the EE Times Product Center.  He was one of the few guys left still interested in covering product announcements, which is going to put a world of hurt on some PR folks. I've had no word on who else got the axe so I'm doing some digging.

Dylan McGrath wrote in EE Times yesterday about an online feud between VLSI Research's Dan Hutchenson and Tom Morrow of SEMI .  You can read the details in Dylan's article but the upshot is that Dan wrote in the Chip Insider that many executives in the semi manufacturing industry are bypassing the show (starting next week in SF) because the find it increasingly irrelevant and useless. Let me state this one more time:  Dan said industry executives said it.  Not him.  Industry executives. That revelation started personal attacks on Dan from Tom in a SEMI blog. I had a similar situation when I was quoted in John Cooley's Deep Chip about statements made to me by others about the fate of the Design Automation and Test Exposition in Europe. Lot's of people sent me personal emails that were less then complimentary and a few that were friendly, but all said the same thing.  "You are wrong." Now for Dan Hutchenson and I to accept that state...

I'm not sure what this means.  We recently completed a complete update of an organization website to make is nimbler, more responsive and easier to evaluate traffic.  It's working quite well, up to the point of showing me something I did not expect in the analytics. I've discovered the 24.86 percent of the traffic on the new site is coming from Apple servers.  Pretty good for Apple, I would say.  Here's the wild thing... Less than 24 percent is coming from Windows server.  The majority of the traffic is coming from Google, Yahoo, Linux and Unix servers. Keep in mind that the organization is part of the semiconductor industry, which is traditionally a Microsoft strong hold.  In what parallel universe would you expect Microsoft be battling for second place against Apple?

I've had several people point out an article in the New York Times from last week that talks about how social media is changing the way publicists do their work. The article points out that the day when deadlines, launch parties, press tours, news releases and getting the "right editor" to cover the news is long gone.  What the article doesn't mention is that very few companies want to put in the time and effort to do that kind of work, much less pay for it.  Most of them have gotten used to being able to crank out a cookie cutter news release, put it up on a discount wire service for a couple hundred bucks, hire a desperate publicist to make a couple of phone calls for about $300, and wait for the clips to come rolling in.  Of course they don't anymore so it's all the publicist's fault. What the Times article is describing is a much more labor intensive process.  Now publicists have to deal with hundreds of bloggers and social medi...

Well, after giving Microsoft it's due on Bing last week, life returned to normal.  Got the latest report on New Tech Press traffic and found that the center still holds.  Google is back to being the number one referral to New Tech Press articles.  I guess people were just checking Bing out and have found, like i did, that there was no big deal. Plus, maybe some people suddenly realized that the new Windows defaults had set them to Bing and they are just resetting to Google.

The past two weeks have been a blur for me as we are coming to the tail end of a massive project for a client and looking for our next big thing. The project involved redesigning a very complex website, moving it to a new server and making the switchover look absolutely transparent to all the users.  We partnered with a very innovative web and software design company out of Costa Mesa, Apogeeinvent , who did an absolutely incredible job of innovating our way through the masses of data and content. Innovation.  That's what I was looking for in taking on this project.  We couldn't ignore what had been accomplished, but the infrastructure that got the client there was showing signs of strain. And budgetary restraints made it difficult to maintain it.  So whole chunks of the supports had to be pulled out, redesigned and plugged in without having the whole thing collapse.  In the past 24 hours the changeover was accomplished and with some minor tweaks an...

On June 3 I said I would wrap up this series within a week.  Well here it is a month later.  Best laid plans and all that. The last entry focused on whether there was actually a tradition of media objectivity and the answer was, pretty much, no.  We are all in a lather about losing an objective media but in truth, we got to where we are today without one.  What we are facing today is not the loss of an objective media, but a vibrant media the provides information and opinion by which we make decisions.  And we are losing it because the financing model is broken.  So how did we get here? There are hardly any news agencies (print or broadcast) that were founded as for-profit organizations.  Joseph Pulitzer made his fortune in law and business before owning any newspapers. William Randolph Hearst made his money in mining.  Frederick Bonfils bought the Denver Post with his real estate fortune.  Every single historic newspaper was founded...