commbasics

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

Last Friday I dropped a flash-bang into the room saying search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t what you should be concerned about.  I got one comment from a SEO person pointing out, very nicely, that I didn’t know what I was talking about because SEO is still very important.  I don’t disagree with that statement because SEO is important... especially if you’re selling ink cartridges and boner pills.  That still doesn’t take away from my original statement.  SEO is not what you should be concerned about, especially if your business is about anything other than commodities. When Google got going in the mid double-oughts, search was THE thing.  People were still getting used to this interwebs thing and it was kinda fascinating being able to find all kinds of stuff that normally took a dozen phone books and a lot of shoe leather.  It also turned the garden hose of information in our lives into a viaduct.  People started applying subjective filters ...

I've been considering and reading about all the changes in the data-eating industry that Google, Facebook, et al are enacting and one big theme is starting to arise in my head: Search and search engine optimization are virtually worthless now.  (That's gonna piss some people off.) It used to be that people kept their browser start-up page on Google because they went on the interweb tubes to look for stuff; sometimes with a purpose but most of the time just to do it.  That's not the case anymore.  I know very few people that fire up their laptops, tablets and smart phones and immediately go to the browser.  now they got to Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, Flipboard or any other application that allows them to get input from their social circle.  I know I'm one of them.  My browers (I use several) are set to open on publication sites like The Economist, SFGate and Electronic Products .  That, too, is not unsual as I see many people re...

The tragedy hitting Japan is recovering from right now cannot be fathomed in its affect on the Japanese people.  It underscores the importance of being prepared for these kind of disasters, and for knowing how to cope in the middle of it.  That's why I support emergency preparedness training in local communities and am particularly proud of my own church that is conducting classes this month in how to help people cope with these kind of disasters. In the context of this blog, however, I would like to point out how important social media can be, in conjunction with mobile technology and I bring it up today in the interest of being prepared.   In this CNN video I was watching this morning, one of the points brought up was how people should stay off the telephone lines to allow first responders and government workers to deal with the problems.  You know this is the right thing to do but when you are in the midst of the crisis it is hard for those affected to res...

In the past two posts I've shown that the consumer electronic industry, with few notable exceptions, has consistently failed to address and meet the need of the buying public ; that the semiconductor industry that follows that lead has delivered suspect information regarding market demand; and that the support industries to the semi industry has no solid idea what their value is to their customer, much less express that value to them.  How have we got to to this place? First off, we have a leadership in place; and a generation of engineers in marketing that were trained by that leadership, whose frame of reference rests in the 1980s markets -- back when electronics was still in the entrepreneurial phase of its life.  In the 1980s, Lockheed Missiles and Space Division was still putting together technical documents with pen, ink and typewriters.  Semiconductor-based products were just the province or technology early adopters (nerds) and were considered generally be...

What do these things have in common? CES AMD board firing the CEO EDAC Annual Forecast meeting Articles about engineers not liking Twitter Give up? It’s all evidence that engineers need to be removed from corporate management in the semiconductors space... that includes electronic design automation (EDA) and test. The nation is either coming out of the recession or is on the cusp of a second recessionary dip.  Revenues in semi are up, Revenues in capital equipment are up, revenues in design automation are up. everyone should be breathing a sigh of relief, but there are ominous clouds on the horizon.  There was all the hoopla at CES about tablets and 4G wireless but the real undercurrent was there was no real innovation.   Not only was there little innovation on display but there were few product that anyone would actually want.  A widely reported study from Accenture showed that 95 percent of the products that were announced at CES would be returned with no def...

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it. As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a p...

I love it when great minds think a like.  First Brian Solis sets up the segue from low-level to high-level engagement, and then Dan Holden talks about what the most important influencers might be.  so today I can talk about where you find the highest-level engagement in your social media program As a recap, since it was almost a week ago, the first level of engagement is made up of people that agree with you and give you kudos.  You know, the really intelligent readers ;).  The second level are the people who disagree with you and can include competitors.  these are people that can help you make course adjustments by giving you a reality check.  You don't have to accept what they say, but looking into the criticism can often make what you share so much better. The most valuable of all engagement, however, is the expansion level -- the people that take your ideas and concepts to different levels.  It may start as either agreement or disagre...

Last week I talked about how it isn't important for engineers to join the market discussion because they don't care why they do what they do; all they want to know is what the parameters of the problem you want them to solve.  The conversation on social media doesn't really need their input either, it's just a means of determining the parameters. But that doesn't mean social media can't help engineers do their jobs better. This all got started when John Cooley trotted out the hackneyed complaint  that he doesn't care about what someone had for breakfast so Twitter and other social networks are useless to him.  He says the conversation is too much of a distraction.  My position is, if all he sees on social media is inane chatter, he needs to get a better social circle.  But let me give a tangential example and then a solution that engineers might appreciate. My daughter, Beth, is following in my footsteps as a communications cons...

I finished, John Cooley's latest reports about an hour ago and have been cogitating on his comments on engineers and Twitter (EE Times reported June 21 that 85 percent of semi design engineers don't like it). John said: "I thought this article was interesting because it also pointed to the  key reason WHY I don't like Twitter    -- my work requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration or I'll mess up what I'm doing." My initial reaction to this point was, "That's valid.  After all you need to learn how to be disciplined enough to know when to and not to pay attention to the conversation, and when to respond, before you can find value in social media." But then he said: "With Twitter you get endlessly pelted every few minutes with random, mostly useless tweets and retweets. "Running IE8 on my netbook is way too sloooow. Chrome is much fasssssster." "Go Red Sox!" "Getting on the plan...

EE Times Group social media guru Karen Field writes today  about why engineers don't like Twitter.  The basic feeling is that they "don't care what someone had for breakfast," and think it's "a waste of time."  While that might be valuable information to marketers (and I'm not saying it is) those are the same objections that people who do do not participate in social media have to all of social media. There was a time where social media was nothing more than a diversion in a participant's day, but that has come to a close.  More than 85 percent of the developed world is actively involved in social media as a communications tool and anyone, engineers included, think it to be a passing fad are in an increasingly isolated minority. But let's talk about Twitter specifically.  If all you see on Twitter are posts from people who talk about their breakfast choices, then you've connected to the wrong people.  If...

Ok, I know what a meme is in principal.  But every time I asked someone to tell me what it is, I got this gobbledygook of technobabble about genes and evolution and conversation.  And when I ask for an example, no one can remember one.  And because I could never get a solid example, the concept was alway murky for me.  But today, I fell into a meme.  Now I know what it is.  I'm going to share. A meme is a web-based conversation that generally has a life of its own.  Consider the email-based urban myth about Madelyn Murray O'Hare trying to get religious programs off TV.  That's a meme.  It's not a good thing, but that's an example.  Memes have basic characteristics in all their forms.  That's where the gene thing comes into being.  My son and I look different, but we share the same genes.  A meme can appear in many conversations that appear completely unrelated, but there are certain aspects of the conversation that link th...

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 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...