commbasics

The redoubtable Brian Fuller posted a great column on EE Life today and I just had to share it with you.  I think it closes the door on whether engineers are or will embrace social media.  Anyone who doesn't see this is destined for the unemployment line.

I got an invitation to attend a webinar on best practices for Facebook pages from an organization I have often communicated with and considered a good information source.  So I signed up. That's 30 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Yes, you should provide interesting content on your page.  Yes, you should encourage engagement on your page.  Yes, you should post consistently and often.  Yes, you can do demographic research through the ad services for free.  And all the people on the seminar echoed everything being said on the seminar on the Twitter pages.  It made me want to scream. The social media industry is becoming as clueless as those industries that claim social media is stupid.  They are patting themselves on the back and cross-selling to their buddies while there is a huge underserved market out there who desperately want to know how to make it relevant to their audiences.   It's no longer important to show ...

Back in the day, I used to haunt a particular dive bar/restaurant on the Sacramento River because I discovered that lots of state legislators... particularly Willie Brown ... used to frequent to do back room deals.  i would sit at a table in a dark corner and keep my ears open.  I wasn't a well-known journalist and my paper was kinda small, but I was able to get a lot of juicy tips on what was going on in Sacramento. Last week i did a stealth drop in at public watering hole last week, found a secluded spot and logged on with my new iPad, all the while keeping my ears open.  Boy did I hear a couple of great statements from some semi execs that were pounding a few Buds. Regarding Magma: "Magma's idea of marketing is to send Rajeev out to talk to his buddies and sign them up for a core technology.  Then they build a product for the customer around the core that works great for the buddies, but isn't transferrable to anyone else." Regarding Cade...

Following up on my last post this morning , I needed to vent.  This is what I came up with. The kind of marketers available to the EDA world   Their reward for their efforts   EDA executives discussing what they really want in a marketing program after they have punished the marketing team and/or cut its budget. Where EDA executives go to look for marketing and PR to replace laid off marketing teams or fired agencies   The type of customer EDA executives are trying to reach  The type of customer that would respond positively to the message the executives come up with  How EDA executives view the power of the messages How EDA customer view the messages EDA executives produce I feel better now

From the depths of EDA comes a common cry. Innovation!   John Cooley posted a kudo to an East Coast company from "West Coast EDA," praising it for an advertisement that was stolen directly from a four-year old, and very tired, insurance company campaign.  They even stole the face of the spokesperson for the company.  And "West Coast" called in an innovative concept.  Unbelievable.

The announcement of Steve Jobs taking another medical leave is an unfortunate but timely bit of news to put this series wrap up in perspective.  Jobs has established Apple as the leading consumer electronics company in the world.  For all intents and purposes, what Apple does drives the rest of the industry. Apple did not introduce the media player, it just made one that most people could use.  Apple did not introduce music sharing, it just made it legally acceptable.   Apple did not introduce the smart phone, it just made the smart phone practical for the mass market.  Apple did not introduce the tablet computer, it just reintroduced it when the public actually wanted one.  Jobs was at the center of all these decisions.  Important to note: Jobs is not an engineer.  He has some technical experience but he has stated the college course that was most responsible for the creation of the Mac was a calligraphy class he audited at Reed College,...

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...