EE Times has relaunched its web presence. It’s a big improvement, with a few aspects that all technology marketers should keep in mind.

• Clean modern look. Pulled from the minimalist Apple school, it uses a spare gray-on-white template that makes content pop.
• Consistency. Sections are easier to navigate with its “universal” navigation bar and a common layout from section to section.
• Social networking front-and-center. EE Times has pulled reader comments and message boards from behind the scenes and stitched them into the editorial content on every page. As you peruse stories and resources it’s hard to miss the most recent comments and most commented stories. This encourages the readers to interact with each other and the content experts.

And in a wink to the world of web services, they even put the little “beta” above the logo. Overall, the new site shows a publisher adapting to the changing landscape of social media and web 2.0.

Over in the comments section of an EE Times article about their Twitter survey, there’s a well-balanced debate around “why engineers don’t like Twitter.”

Aside from the usual concerns around exposing sensitive information and wasting valuable time, what I generally look for in these discussions are the complaints from people who can’t find discussions pertinent to engineers. Instead of finding tweets around PCB design or FPGA software, these folks only see more personal updates on what people had for lunch or the latest blockbuster movie.

One of my favorite things to do is show engineering friends how they can bypass all of that mainstream chatter and get to the tweets that matter to them. And maybe get to know some of the people behind them. (There are more engineers on Twitter than you think; they’re just often more subtle in their bios than the “social media gurus.”)

What engineers should try doing is regularly monitoring the technology terms and brands they care about, bypassing all the tweets about which Chipotle someone just took over on Foursquare.

One simple way to focus on the terms you care about is visiting search.twitter.com. I like to stay on top of discussions around FPGAs.

Sure, there are some job postings and repetitive links to FPGA vendor news releases, but I also find substantive discussions around the technology by real engineers.

Challenge is, visiting search.twitter.com every time you want to stay on top of technology is rather time-consuming. It’s often easier to use some tools out there for monitoring Twitter.

Several tools exist for staying on top of relevant discussions in micro-blogging services. Often referred to as social media monitoring services, these tools can run you a few hundred dollars per month! For free, you can run a simple search at search.twitter.com on technology keywords, product names, vendor brands or what-have-you. Then create an RSS feed (see the upper-right-hand corner of the search page on Twitter) for each term that you want to put in your RSS reader.

You can then check your RSS feed reader — I use Google Reader — to find conversations popping up daily. It’s amazing how many relevant discussions you find, when you’re very disciplined about checking the feeds.

So what do you do if you haven’t used RSS feeds from Twitter but you want to discover a conversation about, say, a “PCB board” right now? Well, you may not find anyone talking about a PCB board on Twitter if all the conversations are a couple weeks old. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land explains, “an index can run out of room.”

For older tweets (but only back to Feb. 2010), you can use Google. Search Google for “FPGA” and you’ll find all kinds of results.

Now, see where it says “More” on the left-hand side of the screen? Click that. There, you’ll see the option to see “Updates.” Those are Twitter updates, reaching all the way back to February. (I remember that month fondly: We had more sun in Portland than in the month of June…)

How cool is that? You wouldn’t believe how many people — even Twitter addicts — don’t know about this Twitter search feature from Google.

Hopefully, monitoring approaches such as the above will help people in the electronics industry — and anybody, really — pinpoint those discussions on Twitter that they’d really care about.

Let me know if not.

Mike Melanson asks “Does your PR firm need a PR firm” in a post on ReadWriteWeb.

Mike bemoans the crass “carpet bombing strategies” used by some PR firms, as reported by VC Jason Mendelson. These firms have simply added bloggers to their lists of victims for mass email blasts.

I bet they brag about being social-media-savvy.

The irony is that they are missing the real opportunity of social media for what we call “influencer relations.” Social media is all about sharing, not broadcasting. If you have information of value to share, you can maintain a relationship with an influencer.

Twenty years ago, you could only befriend journalists by socializing with them at events or taking them to dinner. I know, I was a journalist once and had some great meals on the corporate dime. One reason I took up running.

Now journalists write blogs and appreciate insightful comments. They use Twitter and appreciate responses and retweets that add value to the topics they cover. It’s not that hard to maintain an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship – if you know what you’re talking about!

So when your PR agency talks about how many bloggers they have in their email database, it may be a sign they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Every now and then I read a blog post that makes me say “I wish I’d written that.”  Today, the Radical Ear’s Thompson Morrison blogged about marketing folks’ fear and loathing associated with all things lead gen.  He then articulates exactly why they need to rethink that stance.  Smart and thoughtful.  Rather than paraphrasing it, I’ll just send you here to read it yourself.  Enjoy!

What device did Harold P. Brown invent in the late 1880s to help Thomas Edison publicize the dangers of alternating current?

If you know the answer to this question, and you are an rf or wireless engineer, you would be part of the way towards entering a drawing for a Kindle.

For one of our semiconductor clients we’re running a campaign that features a number of brain-teaser questions like the one above. It’s part of a broader celebration of a significant milestone for the company, and our job is to help turn out the right audience.

Less than halfway through the program, we’re about to hit our overall campaign goals.

How did that happen? Well, we can’t reveal all the special sauce, although Jeff Hardison would be glad to discuss them with you one-on-one.

But here are some of the things that are going right.

• Knowing the audience – engineers are smart, competitive and of course geeky. Technical trivia questions are naturally alluring to them.
• Using an integrated effort – with our broad marketing toolset, we are able to strategize the campaign, develop the microsite, design and run ads, produce and distributed eDM messages, and get the word out on social media channels. Let’s see your specialty agency try that.
• Having some fun – the theme, look and tone of the piece are somewhat more playful than the day-to-day communications from the client. But we’ve learned that engineering audiences enjoy a little humor, as long as it’s done intelligently.

Once the campaign is over, we’ll create a case study of this program and put it with our other case studies on our website. You can read all about it then.

Oh, and the answer is the electric chair.

The AdPulp blog pointed me to an interesting article in The Economist on reaching consumers in emerging markets. Called “Easier Said Than Done,” the article discusses the lengths that major brands go to learn what new customers are doing with their products, even to the extent of dispatching employees to live in the rural countryside for months.

One great example is a line of robust washing machines that can stand up to large amounts of mud. The manufacturer introduced this model after learning that rural users were using their washers “to clean vegetables as well as clothes.” Even though it may not have five washing modes and Internet connectivity, it is selling briskly.

I’m not suggesting that your products should take up domestic chores – although a focused ion beam system may do a nice job peeling a parsnip.

But when I talk to our clients’ customers, during the course of a customer reference program, I often hear that they don’t need every leading-edge spec. Instead: “I don’t use all the bells and whistles. All I need is this specific functionality. If [the McBru client] would offer just that at a reasonable price, I’d buy one for work and one for my home office.”

Your customers may have certain basic needs that don’t require more speed, functionality or innovation. Finding and solving such a need can help you expand your installed base and line up future customers for your more advanced products.

Source www.hwassociates.com

According to a study called “Measuring Marketing Effectiveness” cited in BtoB Magazine, executives perceive that marketing is doing a better job contributing to the bottom line.  That’s good news.  The not-so-good news?  Marketing’s inability to forecast its impact on the bottom line.  This is why marketing is often treated as an organizational parasite, particularly in the tech BtoB space, rather than the essential contributor it should be.  Marketing budgets are slashed at the first sign of economic trouble because we can’t prove that marketing actually delivers meaningful, tangible results.  I continue to be shocked and dismayed at how many tech BtoB marketers don’t even attempt to measure results, creating programs with no measurable objectives, or worse, creating such objectives and then failing to measure, analyze and refine to improve results over time.  If marketing wants to be taken seriously as a vital contributor to the corporate bottom line, we need to get serious about forecasting and measuring that contribution.

With all the content that we technology marketers generate, it’s important to consider how social media is changing our relationship to content.

Of course, you need to start with content that doesn’t suck.

You are probably already using social media to expand how far and how long your content can touch your audiences.

It’s easy to think of content as having value in itself. “I put the white paper on our web site; we are influencing industry thought.” Companies focused on lead generation think of content as an incentive. “Tell us a little about yourself and get this white paper.” These remain viable aspects of content marketing.

Here’s the next wrinkle. Think of your content not as an end in itself, or as a reward, but as an opening to a conversation. It’s easier to take this approach in light of the social media channels becoming viable for deep-tech audiences. Your white paper can inspire a conversation on your LinkedIn page. Your video can gather comments on your YouTube channel. You can post notes from a presentation on Twitter and ask for feedback. Put that reference design into an engineer’s forum and request suggestions for improvement.

Consultant and author Brian Solis alludes to this idea in his Mashable article, “Why Brands Are Becoming Media.” Brands become media, Solis explains, by using the self-publishing technologies of social media to engage audiences in conversations. In this context, he refers to various forms of content as “social objects” which serve as “catalysts for conversations.”

For high-tech marketers, a valuable take-away from the article is the concept of a strategic calendar for developing content, a calendar that “should blend video, audio, imagery, text, updates, and other social objects and networks.”

We use such an approach in our content syndication strategy, which distributes high-value assets that can serve as social objects across as many channels as possible. Then, serving as our client’s community manager, we encourage open and lively conversation around the asset – discussion that builds understanding and interest in our client’s technology.

As a practitioner of social media tools and tactics, we’re often asked about the effectiveness of tools, like Twitter, in promoting technology companies. Approaches and tactics to using Twitter will naturally vary depending on what is being promoted; companies, news, products, content, or events. We’d like to share some recent success promoting a client at a trade show in Amsterdam and explain how one facet of this work can be measured with a new service called TweetReach.

Trade shows and other industry events are a natural fit for Twitter because of the “real time” element of the news from the show floor. Hashtags quickly form around events and a Darwinian process soon produces a winner; as well as a way for the more Twitter savvy participants and followers to view all event related tweets.

McBru actively leveraged social media promotion for the Integrated Systems Europe show in Amsterdam, Feb 2-4 on behalf of Biamp Systems, a Beaverton-based leader in networked media and AV equipment. The #ISE10 tag put up a fight before secumbing to the longer, yet stronger #ISA2010.

In addition to hustling on the show floor, we did windsprints on Twitter and other social media channels to amplify our client’s news far and wide. First, we were able to drive another few dozen people to a global webcast held in conjunction with the show — measured by number clicks on links in our tweets. Second, our activity generated 2,194 impressions on Twitter using the show hashtag. This translates to 2,194 opportunities for people to view our news who otherwise might not have. Impressions were tracked using TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com/), an interesting new web service that monitors the number of tweets and retweets generated on Twitter using a particular hashtag.

A savvy online media entity who ran the event’s blogger lounge claimed the top spot with the most event impressions at 50,811. But out of the 600+ exhibitors at the show, our client proudly made the “Twitter Top Ten” and was the first product vendor on the list. See the quick write-up here: http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/23229.

Twitter’s role in promoting events is sure to grow and evolve in the near future. Keep an eye out for this trend, or better yet, get tweeting and help shape it.

McBru’s James McIntyre, Brandon Wick and I were recently interviewed by Marketingprofs.com about our agency’s work using social media on behalf of business-to-business technology clients. As a result, some of the LinkedIn aspects of McBru’s social media projects for the Itanium Solutions Alliance are featured in Marketingprofs’s new report on Linkedin. If you’re not a “pro member” of the marketing industry site, you’ll need to purchase the LinkedIn report to learn everything, but here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Centralized micro-targeting on a global scale makes it easier to locate well-qualified people.

Company/Marketer: Based in Portland, Ore., McClenahan Bruer Communications (McBru) provides integrated advertising and public relations
services for B2B technology companies.

Among other clients, McBru represents the Itanium Solutions Alliance, a global community of hardware, operating system, and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of solutions based on Intel’s Itanium microprocessors.

Business Lessons Learned
• Use LinkedIn groups to reach a centralized network of internationally
based contacts.
• Identify groups based on your specific goals, and don’t simply assume
the largest groups are best. McBru says some of its best responses
came from smaller targeted groups and that often the members of
those groups were more willing to help out.
• Take the time to listen to what’s happening within the group
Take the time to listen to what’s happening within the group and
figure out what they deem relevant before you begin posting.
• Use personal one-to-one communications for extending invitations
that are credible and apt to be received well.