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.

Making assumptions and marketing, part 2

A couple of weeks ago I talked about marketing assumptions or, in the vernacular, "drinking the Kool-aid."  It's been rolling around in my head and I thougt I'd take it a little further, especially since this is this week's lesson for my tribe.

 The lack of accurate data is the source of failure for most companies and social media programs.  The good news is adopting effective social media practices solves the bad data problem for both.

Most companies begin with some good data that assumptions are based upon and direction is decided.  What causes failure is when ll future assumptions are based on the original data and subsequent anecdotal evidence that validates the original assumption.  That's a recipe for failure or, in the least, a continually contracting market.

It used to be that companies would invest in some level for real market data, but falling revenues at all analysis firms shows that time has come to an end.  For about the past decade, most companies coming to me with market data to back up their claims admits the data they have came from a former company who bought it up to 10 years ago.  The information floats around the Internet and people pick it up as though it is recent, just because someone reposted it a month previous.

Now that might have worked when the data was two or three years old, but when it get's past that time it has the aroma three-year old lunch meat.

In the same way, social media efforts based on those same assumptions make the efforts useless.  Audiences growth plateau as the market realizes the content is just rehashed brochure material and they move on to find something valuable, and executives wonder why they are wasting time on the effort.  

It is still possible to get encouraging data from a bad social web effort, if you continue measuring web stats as they were done 10 years ago -- eyeballs and downloads.  But modern social approaches to web-based information have found those metrics to be completely useless.  Spiders sweep pages for search data and are measured as as though a real human viewed the material.  Much of the content downloaded is never read, and often downloaded multiple times by a single person who keeps forgetting where the put it.

What truly counts is the identity and engagement of the audience.  It is possible with social media to learn who exactly, not generally, is reading your content, what they think about it, whether they consider it important enough to share it and who they invite to the party.  Measurement for this effort, will not be based on numbers, but on the participation, or engagement, of the audience.

In social media, there are a bunch of tools for measuring, producing and improving engagement are one in the same.  I've been finding some excellent result from products from Apogeeinvent, Crowd Factory and Arkayne that provide the data necessary to measure engagement and drive the engagement deeper.

However, from the outset, establishing an arbitrary "goal" for certain numbers to indicate success is not efficient because it will take time to establish a true baseline.  Success is determined by an organization's ability to adapt to the demand of the market, not drive it where you want it to go.  That's the value of assumptions based on real data.

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.

And the answer is... again ... marketing

Couple days ago I asked for some help in figuring out the DAC numbers and one of my readers let me to an article by Kevin Morris at the FPGA Journal about the same thing, but getting into the discrepancies with much more depth.  Answered all of my questions (thanks Kevin) and like I thought, it took an engineer.

But far into the article, Kevin said something very insightful:

"EDA has ignored the majority of electronic designers in the world - who are not doing ASIC/SoC design. Probably 95% or more of the people designing electronic systems in the world today are not designing ASICs, but are instead using FPGAs and commodity processors on custom circuit boards. With a few exceptions - EDA has not invested heavily in serving this 95%, but has instead put the bulk of their development resources into supporting the high-flying 5% doing nanometer IC design."

He was making the point that if trade shows and conferences like DAC, DVCon, DATE, etc. are going to survive they have to go beyond their comfort zones and expand their customer base.  There is only one problem:  You have to invest in marketing -- real marketing -- to be able to do that.

Companies in the electronic design automation, embedded hw/sw, and fabless semiconductor industries just don't do that.  "We know who our customers are, we don't need marketing."  That's been the attitude for the past decade.  The smaller companies used to ride on the coattails of the major players marketing budgets in the 1990 until the latter smartened up and cut their advertising and trade show expenditures, which killed the media for the industries.  But because the smaller companies follow whatever the large companies do, they started cutting back on investment in marketing too.  

So now all of the companies know all of the players in their traditional but rapidly dwindling market, but they lack the resources, understanding and skill to find new markets.  There are zero marketing-driven companies in those industries.  They barely are sales driven.  What they are is engineering-driven. 

And that's why the trade shows are foundering.  It's not the conference committee's responsibility to bring in new customers.  They are there to serve the needs of the current community.  It's the exhibitors' job to bring in fresh blood.  They just don't know how.

End of rant.  Here's the good news.

I talked with a little over a dozen companies at DAC.  That's a better than a 5 percent sample.  More than half admitted they "effed" up in marketing and are looking to increase budgets.  They are looking for real help.  Not the SOS marketing of cranking out news releases and spending 90 percent of the budget on languishing exhibitions, but real marketing with research, social media programs, surveys and long-term strategy.

The conferences are going to have to adjust.  It may mean bringing the size down and going back to hotels with conference facilities (like DVCon) or lower-cost convention halls in out of the way towns (like DATE is doing).  It's going to take time to rebuild the industry, but it sounds like some people are getting with the program.

Marketing requires investment

Technology, no matter how great or innovative, does not make a product successful. Marketing is the key.
A mediocre product with good marketing will always beat a great technology with mediocre marketing. The Microsoft operating system is not the market leader because it is superior to UNIX or Linux, but because Microsoft is a superior marketing company. Intel beat down the Alpha chip not on the basis of superior technology but because of the $100 million "Intel Inside" marketing program (possibly the greatest example of market leadership ever). If good technology won the war, then everyone would have a Macintosh on their desktop.
Every survey produced on the value of marketing (Advertising Council, Centre for Public Relations, Colombia University, to name a few) indicates that companies that spend 10 percent of their revenues on marketing lead their industries. Those same surveys show that successful technology companies spend a maximum of five percent of their revenues (which may explain why technology is only now coming out of the slump). The real telling point of the results is that when marketing investment falls below 3 percent, the product and/or company fails. When industry-wide spending on marketing falls to that level, market share stalls or shrinks (which may explain with the segments of the electronics, like EDA, industry is not yet in recovery).
The Acer tablet PC failure is an example of a company's lack of commitment to marketing. A "cool" technology may gain an initial flurry of press interest, but without an ongoing effort to keep that interest going it will stop. Check out the any corporate website. See if you can find a press contact. If you can't find one it's because marketing is not a priority.
Marketing is considered a cost center, not a profit center. When economies are tight, shareholders and venture capitalists put pressure on corporate executives to cut costs. And the first thing to cut is marketing, right before the janitorial service. That makes the money people and shareholders happy.
But then the revenues continue to fall and everyone calls for more cuts. There goes advertising, trade shows, public relations, maybe sales now. Still the revenues drop. Now what?
Have you ever heard this before?
"There are only 8 or 10 truly important customers in our market and we know who they are."
That's the excuse for not investing in marketing. But guess what, those same customers are saying the same thing. Pretty soon the 8th, 9th, and 10th place companies are merging or declaring bankruptcy. Now you only have 6 or 7 important customers. Your market is shrinking. Why? Because marketing is not a priority even though it generates the leads that expand a company's market and thereby its bottom line.
So what's the solution? If you are an investor –angel, VC or stockholder – look at the financials of your company. If the company isn't investing enough in marketing, yell. If they are and they still aren't succeeding, then fire the agencies or the VP of marketing because they are incompetent. Someone has to make marketing a priority if this current turnaround is going to turn into a growth cycle. The executive staff isn't going to make that priority unless you start telling them to. And if you don't, you deserve to lose your investment.