commbasics

The hot news today is that the EE Times Group of United Business Media (UBM) has purchased the DesignCon conference for a bargain price of $1.4 million.  Yikes.   I've always enjoyed DesignCon because it's technical content is just outstanding and very diverse... and I know I'm not alone in that belief.  Most editors I talk to prefer going to DesignCon than DAC for that reason.  (That's not to say DAC doesn't have good content so put your pitchforks down.)  The big difference between the two conferences is that the former is targeted toward what is going on inside the industry and the latter to what is going on in academia.  Plus dealing with the constantly moving circus that is DAC compared to the consistent location of the Santa Clara Convention Center makes planning and costs a lot easier to control. But I've also felt that DesignCon's marketing has been about at par with what DAC has always done and as a result, the emphasis never changes: DesignCon is...

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...