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...