commbasics

Ok, I said my last post was the last of the week, but I had to add this, because it's really confusing. I'd like to know what you guys think. Last week I reported that Robert Cravotta was let go at EDN in the take over by Canon Communications.  I was pretty hot about it and just didn't understand how they could do that.  Of course I started getting all kinds of DM's IM's, emails and phone calls asking if I knew anything else withe lots of suppositions, but I heard one rumor that sounded interesting.  So I called a buddy who has connections inside Reed and asked if he had heard the same thing.  He had.  But it was still hearsay.  So earlier this week I put a call into Canon Communications LA office, navigated blindly through the voice mail maze and got a human being.  I identified myself.  He didn't want to identify himself.  I asked if he knew about the decision to let go of Robert Cravotta and if so, does he ...

It's time to fess up.  All the problems with the Toyota Prius brake and acceleration systems are my fault.  Let me explain. A few years ago I was a PR consultant to VaST Systems who made virtualization technology allowing engineers to simultaneously test and modify hardware and software designs prior to prototyping and manufacture.  Shortly before I came on board, EE Times did a teardown of the Prius at the 2007 Embedded Systems Conference and one of the small bits of the discussion was how VaST Systems tools were used to build the engine control systems of the 2006 models.  VaST was very proud of this fact and as a result, they turned a lion's share of their concerns to automotive systems development.  Toyota was a marquee customer that th mentioned in all their presentations. Through most of my tenure with the company I regularly but softly recommended that improved safety and reliability should be front and foremost in their presentations, but th...

So earlier this week I offered an explanation regarding why Twitter is important and how to use it correctly.  then a friend sent me this link toda y that looks at it a different way and says what I said even better.

Brian Solis published the latest Nielsen numbers on Social Media use and everything is up and to the right to a level that has to be of concern to Television and movie execs.  There are now more than 300,000,000 people worldwide doing all kinds of stuff on social networks. That is not without some pain, though.  Facebook is adding 500,000 new users a day and that is causing slow performance, browser hangs and crashes.  And the traffic on the web with the newly announce alliance between Yahoo and Twitter isn't helping.  Twitter needs partners and it looks like they got it, much to our computer performance detriment.

I was kinda surprised at how little comment and conversation has been going on over the news that Facebook has overtaken Google News as the source of website referrals on the net.  This is a pretty earthshaking development in the realm of corporate communications. Companies, especially niche technology companies, have relied heavily on Google to disseminate news releases to the customer base on the net.  This has been the primary reason for cutting advertising and PR budgets.  After all, why spend money to get attention when it is virtually free on the 'net? But as I, and so many others, have predicted, the decimation of the news media that provided third party verification of corporate messages, has forced the consuming public to rely on a new, even more uncontrollable third party verifier... their friends and colleagues. The way it works is people see a news release or or other corporate marketing crap on Google and instead of clicking on the link to the company...

Now that I got my rants on the business of media out of my system, I can finish my thoughts on Twitter. Someone recently sent me a link to a Twitter "how-to" manual on Mashable that serves as a pretty good description of what it is and the features, but makes a pretty poor guide on best practices.  It basically treats Twitter as a typical mass medium, which it isn't As I mentioned previously, Twitter is part of the mass media subsection I call micromedia and requires a different approach to communication than traditional mass media, or macromedia.  When you apply traditional communication approaches to micromedia, you will inevitably fail. Take Coca Cola for example.  When they started out on Twitter, they were just pushing advertising and messages.  As a result, one of the biggest companies in the world could only garner 15,000 followers.  But in the past few months, Coca Cola has changed their strategy and is providing information and athle...

I'll get back to the Twitter stuff in the next post, but we need a State of the Media update regarding the takeover of EDN, Test & Measurement World, Design News and Packaging Digest.   I tweeted about the latest twist yesterday with the layoff of embedded/DSP/processor guru Robert Cravotta and got the requisite wrist slapping from the EDN team about being being "sensationalistic" by calling their embedded coverage dead. For the record, I know that what remains of the Reed electronics editorial team will do all they can to continue covering an important industry like embedded, as well as DSP and microprocessors and they will do it as well as they possibly can.  But there are only 24 hours in the day and seven days in a week.  EDN now has at least one less team member to cover a growing industry and their current resources are going to be stretched even thinner.   ( Let me just say it again, with more feeling:  EDN/T&M have an incredibl...

I want to write something about Twitter... and a lot of other stuff, but before I do I have to establish a concept that I've come up with. This blog has always been about the concept of mass media: what it is, how it's used, where it's going.  We all pretty much know that mass media is information sent to large groups of people and we identify it in traditional forms of broadcast and print.  Sometimes we look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and any other kind of search engine as a threat to mass media, but in reality it is just another form of it.  Google still pushes out a bunch of information to a munch of people so it is still mass media. What makes online mass media the same as traditional media is that the goal is to get a response from 1 percent of the audience.  For example, in EDA, if you sent out a bit of communication to an audience of 10,000 people and you got 100 leads and maybe one sale, you would have more than paid for the effort. But social net...

This morning's announcement of Reed Business selling it's electronic industry pubs to Canon Communications could be a big benefit to the old line titles like EDN.  Canon pub editors, like Sherrie Conroy of Medical Electronics Manufacturing  are fairly savvy about social media and can give support to people like Brian Dipert, possibly moving the publications closer to what they should be.   The downside might be that further consolidation of the staff could be in the offing along with a redirection of the editorial focus to manufacturing and less to design.  Why? Because it's the manufacturing industry that's putting money into old media right now, not design. Canon has no ties to the semiconductor/electronics system industry outside of medical devices, so the sales staff and management aren't going to put up with the cost-cutting shenanigans that have undercut magazines and print over the past decade.  At the same time, however, the indu...

Canon Communications picks up Reed EE publications, including EDN. More later. http://www.edn.com/article/CA6719168.html

Finished doing a consult today with a potential client.  Were done he asked, "Are you a time traveler come back from the future to show us the way?" We both laughed.   And then I said, "Yes."

I was having a discussion with a potential client about establishing a social media program.  They were under directive from corporate central to do this, but they were having a problem.  Central required that EVERYTHING that was to be said had to pass review at Central.  As a result, anything they put out in blogs, tweets, Facebook, etc. was weeks old before it got out.  It made their efforts useless.  They didn't know what to do about it. "So tell them that," I said.  "Tell them that getting every word approved before it goes out negates the value of a social media exercise.  It's imperative that the suits at central trust that you can follow a prescribed but loose set of parameters -- ones that can always be adjusted -- but they can't sit on decisions that you have to make on the fly." So they did.  And guess what?  The suits said, "Oh.  That makes sense.  Do that." Sometimes i...

By now, you've probably heard that Penton Business Media, parent of Electronic Design, has filed bankruptcy . You may be wondering what this means. Nothing. The publication titles Penton has will continue to operate.  No one will be laid off.  That's the good news.  It's also the bad news. Penton has done very little to enter the 21st Century of communications.  It's still reliant on the old horses of advertising, direct mail and events.  I'm glad that good journalists like Dave Maliniak still have jobs but without a new infrastructure, Penton will not be able to compete in the global marketplace.

Yesterday, Richard Goering posted a report on a social media panel at DesignCon .  He started with: "I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about blogging, Twitter, and other aspects of “social media,”  At the end of the report he said: "Blogging, Twitter and social networking sites may look like simple tools, but to use them effectively you need to think about what you’re trying to accomplish, develop a plan, and stick to it. It’s an exciting new world with all the perils of any frontier." For decades, we have looked at media as an automatic mechanism.  We push out news releases, contributed articles, websites, etc. and suddenly we have a presence among our audience.  It hasn't really worked that way for a while.  Many companies are turning to social media in hopes that as long as they continue pushing out the same stuff, it will magically give them what they were used to. What Richard, and hopefully many others learned at DesignCon, is t...

I've been waiting for DFT Digest to come back from the holidays and finally dropped a line to John Ford to find out what was up. Turns out that the stuff of life has eased out John's blogging time, which is unfortunate on two levels. One, John had just started to try to market the site as a way to bring some income in (selling advertising), and unsurprisingly, it didn't happen. So the industry's lack of marketing will is still in effect. If it wasn't, John might have had a reason to continue. Two, there just wasn't much decent coverage of design for test issues and technology and that really ticks me off. DFT is one of the more important issues in semiconductor design, it isn't fun, and the people that do it labor in far too much obscurity. But then, if companies involved in DFT were more committed to letting people know what they do, people like John might still be around covering stuff... and Logic Vision might still be viable company rather than a cheap a...

Met a guy recently named Arnold Waldstein, a mover and shaker in the social media world as a consultant and investor.  He recently had a post on the growth of Facebook in third world countries.   It does a good job of throwing out the concept that Facebook is only reaching people in the US. Yes, the US is number one at almost 109 million growing at 64 percent annually and the UK is a distant second at 24 million at 40 percent growth.  But Turkey is number three and growing at 129 percent.  Indonesia is growing at 187 percent and jumped from 7th to 4th in one year.  Even the Philippines beat out Spain and Austraila. And the growth is not attributed to the ownership of computers.  It's based on the use of internet cafes and smart phones. Business is being done in very different ways then what we are used to.