The filters of good content

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 years, but no one has ever done it.  They prefer to stick with assumptions.  I was stunned when this new company took me up on the idea.  And they went about it with a scientifically significant sampling.  What they discovered verified what I was telling them about the media, but also came up with some surprising results even for me.

What was not surprising (to me) was that the publications they thought about targeting with their content barely registered or did not register at all with their audience.  What was also not surprising was that EE Times and EDN were a virtual tie for first. I generally lump these two together since they are both UBM products and generally serve the same audience though for different purposes (more on that later).

What was mildly surprising was that Chip Design and Design-Reuse.com came in tied for third and that John Cooley's DeepChip did not register at all.  I actually thought that the three would be much closer, but as I thought about it, what Chip Design and D&R focus on is generally a much higher level in semiconductor design.  That's a significant bit of information (more on that later, too.)

What knocked me out of my seat, however, was what came in a solid second.  

Linkedin.

I've been following Linkedin for quite a while.  In fact, it was the first social media platform I ever got involved with.  However, until the past couple of years, it just kinda sat there in my browser bookmarks.  That changed in 2010 when I was able to help a client make a contact with a significant potential customer using my Linkedin contacts.  In that process I discovered groups and now belong to and, in some instances, moderate 31.  Some people have called my involvement scattered and can't imagine being able to follow that much, but the results of this survey showed my Linkedin involvement is not that remarkable.  The respondents stated they get their dose of news and opinion from 20 or more different groups.

But none of that information is actually original content.  It's based on content that group members have screened and found valuable... from places like EE Times, EDN and Chip Design.  

In my last post I said that readers are using social media to filter content.  This is a perfect example of how they are doing it.  They are relying on peers and trusted sources to scan through the content and then endorse it.  Most of the groups have moderation filters in place (people like me) who look at suggested content first before allowing it to be disseminated.  The content comes from other trusted sources (like Chip Design and EE Times) and then can be commented upon by members.

And because Linkedin has carefully adopted the image of a businesslike site, you don't get a lot of socio/political spam.

Linkedin was, at one time, the realm of HR managers and job seekers.  It still is very much that, but it has morphed into much more.  It has become a curation site for business information and, as a result, has become an increasingly important channel for  organizations that develop trusted content.  

There have been a few articles recently talking about the fiscal value of Linkedin over Twitter and Facebook.  Part of it is that Linkedin doesn't just get revenue from advertising, but also from subscriptions and job listings, keeping the overall cash flow positive. But the fact that it has proven valuable to business more than developing casual acquaintances has also kept it's stock value high (106 for LI vs 21 Facebook at this writing).  It has kept is focus much narrower and is therefore more broadly valued.  In that point let's go back to the issues of EETimes/EDN and Chip Design.

Fractured vs Focused Readership

The survey showed, as I said, that EE Times and ECN were in a dead heat for readers, which doesn't bother UBM at all, but the respondents said something interesting about EE Times: they approach the massive amounts of content in many different ways.  Some read the newsletters only, some just one or two DesignLine pages, some the weekly digital version, some the videos, some the online front page.  One even mentioned EE Times Confidential.  The audience for EE Times is highly fractured.  They can claim total readership in the millions but with so many channels, the chance that the content about your company will reach the eyeballs of your target audience is just a crap shoot.  Not so much for EDN, however.  The driving number of EDN readers say they go directly to EDN.com for their content and move from there.  So getting front and center there means you get more potential readers for your material.  The downside is it is tougher to get through the editorial filter of EDN than it is for the multiple channels of EE Times.

That being said, channels like Chip Design and D&R give access to a much more select audience focused on issues more specific than EE Times and EDN, and the name of the game in media for high tech is not quantitative but qualitative (Point of order, the survey showed that everyone who reads Chip Design and D&R also read UBM content).

Companies need to look at media non-exclusively. You can't rule out the big media names and you can't assume that just because you like a style of writing that everyone else feels the same way.  My consultee was considering putting all their eggs in a single media bucket because they assumed that the bucket was the best possible choice.  A careful consideration can demonstrate that obvious choices are not necessarily good choices and the best choices are those that take time and effort to foster.  Social media can help, in a big way.

SEO is not your real concern right now, part 2

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 on where they got that information.  Some people chose Google as the start-up page, which became MyGoogle.  Other when to Yahoo.  Some chose the sites of traditional publications like the NY Times.  Then browsers started adding search widgets in the browsers themselves.  Then social networks appeared. That’s when SEO went from THE thing to ONE of the things you had to be concerned about.

Social networks changed the game because now the subjective filter was not a landing page, but what your friends and co-workers thought was important.  If your audience could find out about you from those they trusted, they would be more likely to buy stuff from you.  That is what has made Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and all the others successful... for now.  That is starting to go away. Users are starting to switch allegiances to social media platforms as often as they change phone service or cable providers, but the market, overall, has gone static, and for good reason.

The social platforms are starting to be gamed by marketers whose primary function is to boost sales by any means possible.  There are many who are adhering to basic decency and trying to use social media in a non-invasive manner, but there are even more who are using unscrupulous means to get into the head of the audience.  That is creating a not insignificant level of distrust in the platforms themselves, just as search is not suspect, hence the recent halt in the growth of the more popular platforms in the US.  Google is entering the fray late with yet the third incarnation of their social effort with Google+, but the issues of privacy and who owns what on the network is affecting usage.  Yes, they have had a lot of signups, but while the reviews are good, Facebook groups remains the active platform for now.

So we are entering into another cycle; one that will be difficult for the current players to understand.  It is a cycle that will be based on ethics and trust and it is something that cannot be generated by an algorithm.  This is going to take some work.  

And I will talk about that next week.

SEO: it isn't what you should be concerned about now

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 reading news sites of traditional media like the NY Times and the WSJ.  You don't need to go to a search engine site to get started because every browser has a little search window.

Why do we do this now? Because the information we get from the apps, social circles and specific publications are trustworthy.  You can't trust what you find on Google or Yahoo or even Bing because you know that he who spends the most money on SEO gets to the top of those lists, so you find places you can trust.  SEO doesn't do that.  You may not agree with me but there are some very big players that do.  One of them is Google.

Google+ is the next big thing for Google and they are all in on this concept.  They know if they don't make this work they will be nothing in 20 years.  They know that the audiences don't trust the information they get from the vaunted Google search engine but the audience has ways of getting around the high-paid subterfuge of corporate SEO addicts.  They are using social media platforms that are eating into the Google influence sphere like a swarm of locusts through a wheat field.  Google+ says, "We know you don't trust us, so let us listen in as you talk to people you do trust.  Maybe we can figure something out."

This is a revolutionary moment in media that will drive us back to a time when media actually held the trust of the public.  And I'll explain that next week.

Japanese disaster underscores importance of social media and mobile technology

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 restrain themselves.

I remember during the Loma Prieta earthquake, I was on the first business trip of my career and was 400 miles away from my wife, my 5-year-old daughter and my one-month old son.  i saw the coverage of the fires in SF, the collapsed freeway in Oakland and the damage on the Oakland bridge.  I had to find out if my family was alright and I spent 5 hours trying to get through to them.  That would not have been an issue if I had a smart phone with a data package.

Thinking about that time and the technology available to me today makes me realize what an amazing world we live in.  A simple text message takes up almost no bandwidth on the communication lines and can maintain a crucial connection with family.  But it doesn't stop there.

Smart phones with video cameras can be used to transmit pictures of injuries.  Location-based social applications can pinpoint where survivors are.  And most importantly, it can keep families connected in desperate times.  Facebook and Twitter may be too public for situations like this, but could be useful.  Lesser-known applications that focus on local communities, like DeHood, might be more effective as they better integrate audio, video and text.

For example, in a situation like Japan, using an iPhone and DeHood, you can take pictures or video of injuries, electrical dangers, fire, etc. and send them directly to emergency services, media or even family.  You can use the GPS services to identify your location and, even in some cases, virtually check if you are not actually on site but are within visual range.  First responders can ask questions, direct you to safe areas and do more efficient disaster triage.

Yes, of course that depends on having the mobile phone system up and running.  It's not perfect, but in my case with Loma Prieta, I would have been able to make quick contact with the family or at least neighbors who would know what is going on.  The point is, it wasn't possible then.  It is possible now.

Many people still think that all this technology is just fun and games.  You can't say that for people seeking freedom in the Middle East, or for those trying to survive in Japan.  We all need to think beyond the convenience and what this means for our communities.

Who's in charge? Act 3

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 beyond the ability of less mortals to comprehend, much less work with.

Today, however, there are people in IT departments with high-school equivalency certificates building desktop computers with components they get at Fry's.  Most cell-phones are upgraded every 20 months and some are considered disposable.  Consumer electronics has crossed the chasm and marketing needs to focus on late adopters to expand the market.  But what does the industry market to?  Engineers who think Twitter is stupid.  

No, that's not fair.  There are many engineers that find Twitter to be quite valuable and they buy these products.  No, it is more accurate to say that the market is addressed by companies, run by engineers who think Twitter is stupid.  The people who buy the products that are made by these companies have adopted social media in totality.  More than half of the US population has Facebook account.  These people are talking among themselves about these products, but the engineers in charge of marketing... or at least those engineers in management who are telling marketing that Twitter is stupid... have no idea what is being said.  Instead, they are talking, by email, phone and tradeshow meetings, with their friends who agree that Twitter is stupid about how smart they are.

They are living in a virtual biodome of their own construction that has preserved a 30-year-old paradigm perfectly.  It is a fantasy.

Is Facebook really worth $50 Billion?  They create a product that more than half the country uses and has spawned multiple additional industries with companies also valued in the billions.  The company is creating a lot of wealth and business.  It is a source of optimism and news.  The real question is, what is an EDA company really worth?  They create products used by a very small group of users to create products that 95 percent of the market will send back because it isn't what the customer wants.

So what is the answer to this problem? I really think it comes down to management.  And the electronics/semi industry management is filled with engineers who are making marketing decisions based on 30-year-old paradigms.  These guys are remarkably talented and knowledgeable -- when it comes to making complex technology, but they need guidance from people who are equally remarkable in talent and knowledge about the market.

A few weeks ago when I was considering writing this series, I got a call from a journalism buddy who encouraged me to go for the jugular on this subject.  He was royally PO'ed at a particular industry that does little to no advertising for the simple reason "they say they know their customers and what they want" so advertising doesn't help them.  And yet, this editor says he gets calls from company after company, that uses this same excuse for not supporting an industry publication, and that still expects the magazine to take their calls, send out editors, take meetings and write stories about their cheap little companies.  "If the customers already know everything they need to know about these companies," he wondered.  "Why do I need to write about them?  Why do they still send me their lousy press releases?  Why do they even go to trade shows?"  And why are they still not profitable?

Over the past 20 years, B2B publications have taken a major hit as more companies took this attitude to the point that we almost lost them altogether. What many people may not realize is that these publications found gold in social media and are using it to gather information about companies while, at the same time, creating sources of revenue.  They no longer need top go after these little companies to advertise once or twice a year, because they can sell their content to engineers who DON'T think Twitter is stupid.  They have found new, exciting industries to write about and less and less of those industries reside in the electronics world.

The engineers running the majority of electronics, semiconductor and EDA companies have run the market into the ground.  They have received a brief stay of execution in the current turn around, but don't expect it to last.

To get out of the cycle some drastic changes need to be put in place.  

To be continued.

Who's in charge?

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 defects “because the product either didn't meet customer expectations (not useful) or consumers thought it was broken because it didn't work the way they expected (not usable).”  The products fail because the companies that make them have no idea what the market really wants.

The reason AMD booted their CEO is because he not only  missed the window on netbooks and smart phones, but he’s also booted the tablet opportunity (which takes us back to CES and the fact that most of the tablets shown aren’t going to be available yet because they don’t have the chips to run them.

And then there are all of these wonderful statements about how engineers thing social media is useless for them because they don’t care about what someone had for breakfast.

All of these examples -- and I can give a dozen more that have come to light in the past three weeks -- demonstrate that the semiconductor industry, et al, has not got a clue what is going on in the world.  The reason? The industry is run by engineers... who talk to each other... but not to the rest of the world.

Facebook is closing in on 200 million users in the US alone.   More than half the country is on it to some degree.  That means we have gone past the point of general adoption.  If you add in all the other platforms, pretty much the only people not fully adopting social media as a means of communications and information gathering are the luddites at the far right of the bell curve ... which would be engineers who think Twitter is stupid.  And those are the guys directing the companies that make the technology that social media runs on.

Marketing people are pretty much all on board.  the only ones who have not adopted a social media strategy are those who are still getting their budgets cut by management (engineers) who think Twitter is stupid.  That’s why really competent marketing people have got their resumes out to companies outside of the semi world, desperate to find a place that thinks marketing is a good idea and that social media is an important part of it.  

There are some companies trying to break out of the mold, like Cadence Design.  Cadence has launched the EDA360 program which is, in essence, the first real new marketing effort by an EDA company in the past 20 years.  It is bold and not without detractors (mostly engineers who think Twitter is stupid).  But internally it is receiving significant resistance by the R&D teams, made of of engineers who think Twitter is stupid, and the morale in marketing is plummeting.  Market leader Synopsys has put both feet squarely on social media as a marketing tool... but they have cut all other forms of marketing to practically nothing. They have no means to measure whether their efforts are having an effect.  As one marketing exec told me at the Design Automation Conference last year, “We know we have to do social media, we just aren’t sure why.”

NOTE: Social media is a great tool for marketing.  It is not a replacement for real marketing.

AMD is a big EDA customer which makes sense because AMD builds a lot of complex chips.  They decide what chips to build based on their marketing data.  Their marketing is driven by engineers who talk to other engineers who haven’t purchased, much less read a marketing report that wasn’t 20 years old.  Yes, I’m sure you can pull an example out of your hat that contradicts this statement, but if it wasn’t true, how has AMD missed the window every time.  

Intel, the market leader, isn’t much better, even though the do invest in some good marketing.  One of the big stories at CES was how ARM is starting to breathe down Intel’s neck... and how Intel still can’t seem to come up with a product that works well in portable products.  Let’s not mention the fact they were forced to fund Nvidia to the tune of $1.5 Billion. 

Switch back to the support industries for semi: EDA and Test.  These guys base their marketing data on the input they get from the engineers at companies like AMD.  How do they get their numbers?  Years ago I worked for a large Japanese semiconductor company.  I was fairly new to the PR game.  I got a call from a large analyst firm for some confidential sales number so they could do a forecast.  I went to the head of the division for the product line in question and asked him what to tell the analyst.  He asked me, 

“What did we say last year?”  I looked it up and told him.  

“Add 10 percent to it.”

“We increased sales by 10 percent?”

“I have no clue, but we’re not going to tell him the real number.”

This guy was an engineer.  If he is still in the business I bet he thinks Twitter is stupid.

 To be continued.

Social media for your neighborhood.

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 problem: you can’t without a lot of effort.

I discovered this over the past two years on some pro bono work I’ve been doing for Sustainable Redwood City.  I wanted to use social media to grow the organization but discovered that if I didn’t already have a personal relationship with people in my community, I couldn’t actually get them to connect with me or the organization on any SM platform.  I had to meet them first before they would accept the connection.

I also could not use social media to discover people in my community or neighborhood because the platforms did not get that granular.  In Facebook, for example, I can choose the Silicon Valley network or the San Francisco network, but not the SF Peninsula, San Mateo County, Redwood City or my own neighborhood, Friendly Acres.  I was forced to accept a position in a large geographical context.  This isn’t as much of a problem if you live in New York City or San Francisco, but it doesn’t help the 2 million+ people in the Bay Area.

What social media lacks is a local approach and even the entry of Twitter and Facebook into this realm is not helping.

Geolocal/social apps are supposed to help solve that problem by making it possible for local business to reach their local community and expand their business.  If you are an ice cream shop or a coffee bar, it’s a great idea because you will succeed if you get a lot of regular customers.  If you are a dentist of an auto shop, not so much.  If you go back to those guys more than once in six months you have a problem.  But the real benefit lies with the vendor, not the customer.  You need a way for those customers to come together in a community, without violating personal space or privacy.

And that’s the good news because I have discovered some startups that are doing exactly that.

The one with the biggest name is Yelp.  They’ve recently added a geolocal aspect to their reviewing service where you can check in to favorite establishments, but again, they are focused only on commercial outreach and only to whole cities, not neighborhoods, so it is a step in the right direction but not exactly what I think people need.  

Next up is a tiny little company called Gogoverde, which is hyper focused on neighborhoods and is currently only available in Palo Alto and Redwood City.  But they lack the geolocal tech at present.  Mostly what they do is get people who already know each other to join a local network and share information and materials.  

But the app  I’m really excited about is a company called DeHood.  I’ve been using the app for a while, sending some of my activity on it to my Twitter and Facebook pages and even went in to talk to the company leadership, Babak Hedayati and Mike Mertz, to find out more, which lead to a consulting contract with them that started a couple of days ago (so there’s your full disclosure)

But I’ve been using the tech for several weeks now simply because it accomplished what I’ve been looking for: a social media application that can build local and REAL community.

And what DeHood does will be the subject of the next post.

Engagement is where you find it.

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 disagreement but goes deep into the issue and becomes a virtual partnership.  These are the people that link to what you have to say and send it out among their own networks.  These are the people to find and cultivate because they help you to understand yourself better.

Over the past few years, I've found a lot of these people.  Like Brian Fuller now back at EE Times and his boss Paul Miller; like the aforementioned Solis and Holden; like someone who may read this and give his own two cents to the concept.  Because of this interaction I have been able to better define my philosophy ad business model to the point that I can now get it across in a matter of minutes with very little Q&A.  Doesn't help with short budgets, but I know I can fit what I do into almost any budget around.  These relationships have also helped me escape the small orbit of the semiconductor world and explore new technologies, countries and cultures.  I've even entered the political arena in some areas.

But here's the thing, while there are tools that can help you quantify this kind of interaction, you can't really qualify it with tools.  You have to go out and find it.  Luckily, that's not as hard or time consuming as it may seem.

Hashtags, retweets are probably the most common ways of finding some of these third level influencers, but most of what you will find are second level followers -- the people that agree with you.  What is most helpful is linking multiple platforms.  I currently write five blogs on widely different subject to widely different audiences.  i also maintain 3 presences on Facebook, three on Twitter, one on Linked in (with participation in 2 dozen groups), one on Plaxo and about a half dozen other more obscure social networks.  Now if I was actually maintaining each of these individually, I would have no life and no home.  But all social networks make it possible to link to other networks and other social media platforms.  All of my presences on the social web are linked to each other, so when I post something in one place, it pops it in multiple places, like Facebook, Plaxo, and Networked Blogs.  

My readers pick them up there and, amazingly enough, begin conversations there.  Those of you reading this on the State of the Media site may wonder if I get much engagement here and, in fact, I don't.  I get about two or three comments a month here (which is actually more than a lot of blogs), but what you may not see are the conversations and comments going on about these posts in other platforms.  The most prolific area is actually Networked Blogs, followed closely by Facebook and then Twitter.  As it is, the 6,000 members of my worldwide network are pretty chatty and I get some great feedback from them.

This kind of following and feedback didn't happen overnight, however.  This network has been growing organically for about 6 years, when I really tarted getting into the social media scene.  I do very little promotion because I like to see how it can develop naturally.  If I put more promotion into it, I would imagine it might grow much larger, but right now I can handle it on my own.  What could you do with it if you had some staff to help?  What could you learn? And who exactly would be participating in the conversation?

That will be the subject of part three.

Using social media to cut through the chatter

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 consultant, but is staying away from technology to follow her own passion:  Drama and Dance.  She is working with several non-profit organizations to go into public and private schools bringing arts programs in at no cost to the schools.  She's established a summer program, developed and promoted several productions and sits on the board of one of the theater groups she works with.  Quite proud of her.

She is also very active in social networks and participates in both the inane and important discussions that go on in them... pretty much like everyone else does.  But she uses these technologies to improve here own business opportunities.  Here's the example:

She has come up with an idea to create a Shakespearean drama program for elementary schools and has the support of a couple of theater groups, but no money.  She is known in the drama community around the Bay Area, so she threw out the idea on Facebook and asked if anyone knew any grant writers that might be able to help her find funding.  Within 24 hours she got a response from a grant writer that she did not know existed and who is also active in community theater.  They are working on the project as I type this.

A problem, a solution, a strategy and a project all created through the use of social media and "inane chatter." This can be easily applied to John Cooley's work.  

John works as a consultant to many companies helping them through particularly difficult design challenges.  It's not easy but John is very good at what he does.  Sometimes, though, he approaches others for advice on how to approach a problem.  He has to do that through email, or on his Deep Chip reports, all of which can take days and weeks to get a response from.  Why? Because John, like everyone else, is overwhelmed by the flood of information and dreck that comes through his email system.  Sometimes important things get lost in spam filters and, as John said, he needs to concentrate on his problem and doesn't have time to go through all the "inane chatter" he gets through email... which is really his primary source of communication.  

If, however, he was using Twitter or even Facebook, he could cut through a lot of that chatter by spending 5 minutes a day for a couple of weeks, creating a social community made up of people he trusts.  That's where a lot of people fail in the arena of social media: They don't take care regarding who they let in.  If John did establish a Twitter account, he would probably be swamped by the number of people who would follow him, but what he may not understand is he does not have to follow any of the once he does not recognize or respect, and that he could make a direct connection with those he does.  Once making that connection with what the social media world calls a "trusted source" he can use Twitter to post a simple question about a particularly thorny problem he's trying to resolve. i.e. "Anyone having any luck with new Cadence's XYZ tool?  DM me."

Now he has opened a conversation with a very short question.  Those he has established as a trusted source can send back a direct message with a short overview of what they have discovered.  If it works within the parameters of his need, he can now send an email or make a phone call.  Twitter has now become a valuable filter that bypasses traditional email conversations and avoids "inane chatter."  

There are many people who use social media as a time filler, but you can say that about instant messaging, texting, email, or even coupon clipping.  The value of your communication lines is entirely up to the individual using it.  My 26-year-old daughter can figure that much out.

Twitter and engineers, redux

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 plane SNA to
DEN. Anxious to see my family." "Cool. IBM does 'innovation jams' to help
generate ideas." "Watching a presentation on VHDL-2008. I want to program
in nothing else from now on!" "NPR's Carl Kasell has been nominated to the
Radio Hall Of Fame! Details on how to vote: xxxxxxxx" "A cartoon for all
you Mamas." "Apple controls 20% of NAND Flash market says DRAMeXchange
with iPhone and iPad." 

My reaction to this point was, "Is that what engineers discuss when they are supposedly talking to each other?  What kind of social circle are you in, John?"
This is what's on my Newtechpress Twitter feed as I type this:
What the mass market wants in a connected TV...and can't find yet. New blog post @ http://bt.io/FYOV#webTV #connected TV #googleTV
Oxygen sensors (google): Q&A: Check manual for details on timing belt vs. timing chains -:http://bit.ly/9MYWbc Full http://bit.ly/9zcMu2
And I'm not an engineer.  When people I follow only post where they are eating, I drop them because I don't really care, in the context of New Tech Press, where people are at the moment. But then I had something of a revelation.  
It probably doesn't matter if semiconductor engineers like using social media because their input would have no real value to the community at large.  Here's why: 
Prior to the growth of social media we had three classes of participants in the market conversation --Producers, Consumers and Observers (vendors, customers and press).  Even though observers made every effort to be objective, they were still viewed with skepticism by the other two.  Producers and Consumers did not trust each other either and the Observers didn't trust each other, much less the other two.  It was a circle of mutual distrust.  But in any discussion, whoever decided to agree created the winning viewpoint.
As the Observers became economically unable to provide objective insight, What remained were two groups that did not trust the other and relied on insight provided only within their group, isolating the discussion in the marketplace to little more than rumor... until social media rose to take the place of the Observer role, which is what is happening now, although with much less effort to be objective.  
Right now, the discussion in the marketplace is being defined by those participating through social media.  Traditional press is more reliant on the social discussion then it is on traditional interaction between Consumers and Producers (in the form of news releases, trade shows, press conferences, etc.) because it takes less time to monitor the social online conversation than it does to hop on a plane to a convention.Except in the world of the engineer... because the engineer doesn't care about the problems and insight of anyone but whoever is on his design team.  The concern of the engineer is the issue on his desk at the moment... Just like John Cooley said... and he needs to think about it uninterrupted .  Just give him the numbers you want to hit and leave him alone to figure it out.  That's the way traditional engineers figure stuff out.  They don't care why they have to hit those numbers, they just know they have a deadline to hit them.  So go away and leave them alone.But the discussion in the social network is all about the "why" of the numbers, not the numbers themselves.  That's what makes social media important to the majority of the market.
So, does that mean engineers should just not worry about learning how to use social media, like Twitter?  Nope.  And I'll tell you why next.

Why engineers don't like Twitter? Sound familiar to me.

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 you use it simply to pass the time, you haven't used your experimental time valuably.  But if the people whose tweet you read provide you links to valuable information (mine do), and you receive direct messages from trusted colleagues from twitter through text on your cell, bypassing email mazes (and I do) and if you share valuable insight on what you have discovered (I try to) or update followers on important changes and issues in your life ( I do), then you have discovered something valuable that doesn't waste your time or anyone else's.

Social media does not replace face-to-face communication, it facilitates it.  Twitter is not the be all and end all of social media, either, it is a tool for specific purposes.  You don't take a nail and hit it with a wrench into a board and then complain that it's a waste of time.  Twitter doesn't replace the technical paper, but it can help you find one you need that you didn't know existed.

Don't throw out a tool because you don't know how to use it.  Leave it in the box until you have the time to learn.

What the heck is a meme?

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 them together.  Sometimes you can strictly control the meme/conversation but what fun is that.

Here's the meme I fell into today.  

I've been studying Twitter for sometime, reading articles, blog posts, books and my own pathetic scrawlings to figure out how to best use it.  My study actually began with a post on doshdosh.com 17 ways you can use Twitter that I discovered two years ago and pretty much disagreed with.  I've been adding to my notes and coming up with ways to find the best use of the platform for my partners (I used to call them clients, but that's another story).  Anyway, I came up with five points that I wanted to drive home and today was the day to unveil them during a consult session.

I rolled out my intro about how Twitter has changed from something that was fairly vapid to something newsworthy and how you shouldn't worry about how many followers you have unless you're famous like Demi Moore.  The guys I was doing the consult to said, "sounds like you're reading from Guy Kawasaki's blog."

Ok, I do read Guy's blog and get a lot of good stuff out of it, but this wasn't one of them.  In fact, I am way behind on my Alltop reading, but the post Guy shared came from another blog called How to get Focused, which had seven points, four of which were almost identical to four of my five.

Were we all plagarizing from each other? Nope.  But we are all circulating around the same water cooler, pontificating, musing and questioning each other, so it not unlikely that we are going to come to some of the same conclusions.  And that is what memes are, just in case you were wondering.

The importance of social networks becomes evident

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 to get more information, they go to their favorite social network, in this case Facebook, and ask their group what they know/think about the company.  Those friends refer them directly to the company, or worse yet, a rival that they think is better.  

You think this is a recent phenomenon?  Au contraire, mon amis ( which is about all the French I know).  Check the search rates on Google for just about any significant technology company or niche since Facebook became open to more than just college students in about 2007.  They have been steadily dropping -- not dramatically but steadily -- as the growth of social network platforms significantly increased.

So when you are considering the impact of mass micromedia (which I just found out was coined by Jeremiah Owyang that term, damn it) that's the big one.  If you haven't figure it out yet, it is sucking the life out of your outdated marketing approach.  You may need to get some help. fast.

Macro/micromedia Part 2

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 athletic celebrity connections through Twitter, as part of their Super Bowl and Winter Olympic programs.  The result is 500 million interactions and not a corporate message in the lot. Note the difference in the measurement:  Followers vs Interactions.

In contrast, their Super Bowl advertising only reached 100 million viewers with no measurable interaction.

Closer to our world, as a good example, is Best Buy, which uses Twitter in two directions, but only two.  One is for internal communications and one is for customer support.  In both cases Best Buy uses Twitter with a specific audience in mind with the goal of creating a conversation, an engagement between the corporation and the audience (employees and customers) on a specific topic.  Employees can make suggestions, point out issues and connect directly with each other. Customers can get real-time responses on product problems and questions.  And more to the point, they get them without alot of bother.  You have to get pretty specific with only 140 characters and you have to take a lot of emotion out of the mix.  No name calling, in  other words.  Much more efficient.

Bad practices on Twitter abound and are at the heart of a lot of the disaffection and abandonment of Twitter.  Corporations and individuals with a promotion-only (read one-way messaging) find they get ignored (no response) or get flamed.  They don't understand that this isn't an advertisement.  Lots of people don't get/like Twitter because all they see is a raft of links to ads and news releases and they walk away from it.  They are right to, unless they wise up and start blocking people who only or mostly only send those kind of links.  You have to do some culling to to get some value.

The real value of Twitter is four fold.  One, if you look at it as a place to find trusted sources, it will take some time (the culling process) but it will yield results.  That's my primary use for it.  I find good sources of information through Twitter on a regular basis, but I follow only a few dozen people.  

Second, Twitter can serve as a very effective alternate email system.  I maintain connection to several of my followers and followees through direct messages.  There is no spam.  None.  

Third, it can be a great measurement tool.  When I send out my rare press release, I never put it on Twitter directly.  i wait to see if it gets picked up and disseminated from any of my trusted sources.  If it does I know that the news has some real value.  And from that point I can feel free to retweet that.

Fourth and finally, it can connect disparate social media/networking platforms.  Not all the people on my Linkedin community are on my Facebook community, jsut as not all in both of those are on my Twitter accounts.  But by sharing tweets, retweets and links on Twitter to my other platforms I expand readership across all and foster the conversation.

And that's the difference between macro and micro media.  The latter is conversational and is best shared with a limited audience.

Macro/micromedia

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 networks are also a form of mass media, although different from search engines.  The difference is that while they are still putting out information to groups of people, the groups can be only a small percentage of the total audience of the niche and be more successful than even a Google campaign.  Why? Because the social network audience is not made up of the whole audience, but the RIGHT portion of the audience or, specifically, the 100 leads you would have gotten from the original 10,000.

Social media is an entire different segment of mass media from traditional media.  The rules are different, the practice is different, the success rates are different and in order to do it right you have to do it completely different than traditional media campaigns.  So I'm creating two separate divisions of mass media that I'm calling macromedia and microcmedia.

The macro division includes print, broadcast, website and search engine practices.  The micro division refers to Facebook, Linkedin, Google Buzz, blogs, status sites (Twitter).  I'm going to leave this at the front of State of the Media for a while for reference, but we're going to camp out here for a while.