Hey, guess what? You can go home again. Just ask Brian Fuller.
From the press release; "Fuller will drive product news, information and community and also provide engineers and their marketing teams with the assistance they need to bring products to market more effectively, leveraging the breadth of EE Times' capabilities -- from products to e-learning, news, events, courses, webinars and video."
This is ridiculously good news for the semiconductor industry's marketing wonks, especially those who have come to appreciate and implement social media strategies within their ranks (and there are still damn few of those). Brian has been on a personal journey into the social world that began at EE Times and their convulsions over whether to stay as a traditional media house or to branch out into other directions. In that journey he learned what it was like to be a PR hack, an in-house marketing guru, a freelance writer and unemployment.
He brings back to EE Times a great understanding of how difficult it is to have a vision for communication when most of the industry is still trying to work like it's 1999.
But be prepared. Brian is a very nice guy and will talk pleasantly with you, even if you have not a clue how to communicate your product. If you are one of those, he will walk away and it will be like the conversation never happened. Be proactive. pick his brain and listen to what he advises. You'll be better off
Lou, thanks for your kind words and for your really tireless efforts to evangelize social media in our world.
ReplyDeleteYour penultimate paragraph is spot-on. Let's face it: we work in an industry that has built the internet from the ground up but whose engineers are trailing adopters of the technology. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Wayne Gretzkey said skate to where the puck WILL be, not where it is. You and others do that. The audience will get there in some form. Whether confidentiality concerns and what not temper their online passion is one thing, but they WILL be online in increasing numbers.
From where I've sat the past three years, it's clear that companies have been investing heavily in their own web presence. That's a good thing. At the same time, the dollars used to fund that build-out have been pulled from their media investment.
When the hangover from that high pounds on, they start to realize, hey, where's the audience?
The answer? It's still reading / engaging with industry publications.
I think the next 10 years will be a fascinating time in which publishers and their customers figure out new and very smart ways to best serve that audience in a social media world.