Lou Covey has been a professional communicator for more than 30 years as a journalist, technical writer and corporate communications consultant. He has written for the Palo Alto Times, San Jose Mercury-News, Lodi News-Sentinel, Sacramento Bee, New York Times, ECN and MacWorld – and he covered the 1976 presidential campaign with the national press corps. Since 1990, Lou has represented leading embedded software and hardware suppliers, electronics firms, and CAD software companies. He currently manages the communication strategies firm Footwasher Media and it’s PR service VitalCom. Lou blogs at State of the Media.

Rick: As one with extensive experience helping technology companies communicate with engineers, what’s different today (compared to a couple years ago) with regard to how engineers use the Internet to inform and advance their professional interests?

Lou: Probably the biggest change is that the audience for technology companies has grown far beyond just engineers.  The collapse of the “free” media infrastructure has left a huge void for multiple audiences that were once better served by a professional media that is now very limited.  Engineers who used to rely on news releases and company websites for the bulk of their information also had the balancing effect of an independent media to provide a “reality check” on marketing messages.  With that ballast removed from the equation, they can’t be as sure they are getting the straight story from their corporate information sources. 

Social media has stepped in to a certain extent, but much of it is still corporate noise.  That’s just in the engineering world.  Corporate financial people and investors relied more heavily on the media to provide the bottom line information that endorsed either the purchase of products or investment in startups… or even the purchase of stock.  I’ve found in my own web stats that most of my readers are either CFOs or VCs looking for some sort of independent analysis of technology and directions. 

For engineers this lack of information hampers their ability to make their companies financially viable.  I’ve recently been approached by a new angel group to come and consult on potential investment directions for them and help them do the due diligence.  A couple of years ago, they could have found that information in both the trade and business press. Now they are coming to people like me, which gives a communication consultant the role of gatekeeper to funding. 

Rick: If you could fast-forward into the future, what does this picture look like two years from now?

Lou: I think it’s coming full circle.  I took a hiatus from journalism in the early 80s and worked as a technical editor for an aerospace company, my first exposure to technology writing.  But I had no technology background.  The company hired me because of my experience and training as a writer.  They didn’t want their engineers involved in the writing for two reasons: they had better things for engineers to do and the engineers had no idea how to communicate with their customers.  The company I worked for found value in the ability to communicate and had a separate value for engineering.  Worked pretty well.

Now I can’t imagine any industry allowing independent communications consultants to have the kind of power I mentioned previously.  They are going to want to bring that in house, somehow, even if it means contracting with the consultants.  To be effective, that kind of arrangement will require real dedication to ethics that most consultants have little knowledge of at the moment, but it will become necessary.  Companies that continue to believe that their technology and expertise is all they need to succeed will fail.  Most won’t even get enough funding to get off the ground.  And established companies that don’t learn the secrets of real communication — not just pumping out marketing messages — will start to fail as well.

We will see a new crop of industry leaders with a renewed value on the ability to communicate.  those that don’t change will disappear no matter how great their technology or product is.

Rick: What are the primary challenges faced by corporate communicators in this everybody-connected-to-everybody landscape?

Lou: Getting the engineers in charge of the process to allow trained communicators to do communication.  I’ve been in this business almost 40 years now and I’ve seen precious few marketers, much less engineers, who understood how the media worked when everything was healthy.  How can anyone expect them to understand a new paradigm that has cropped up under their noses in the past five years?  The people best equipped to explore and implement social media strategies are those who understand how media works.

Right now, engineers believe all they need to do is communicate with other engineers, but they need to learn how to address multiple audiences or pay people who know how to do that job.  I’m not even sure engineers can communicate with other engineers outside of their own discipline.  A verification engineer can converse easily with another verification engineer, but I’ve been in several meetings with engineers from software, verification, test, etc. and none of them knew what the other was talking about.  That might have been acceptable 10 years ago, but it won’t work now.  A professional communicator can overcome that chaos.

Rick: It’s generally understood that using social media channels like Twitter to broadcast a steady diet of press releases is a sure way to lose followers. Do you agree and, on a broader scale, what do you suggest the PR community do to adapt to a world forever changed by Web 2.0 – and why?

Lou: If it were generally understood, people wouldn’t continue doing it. But smart-ass comments aside, the PR community needs to first learn and adhere to a standard of ethics similar to the Society of Professional Journalists or, at least the Public Relations Society of America, which adapted their standards from the former.  Second, they need to learn to say “no” to clients.  It is considered business suicide to do either.  I know it’s tough, but it’s the reason I do very little work with semiconductor and EDA companies now.  I refuse to take payment to follow a paradigm I know will fail.

It is not hard to find PR professionals who totally get social media.  It’s not hard to find pros who want to put it into effect.  What is hard is to find clients that are willing to change from the steady drumbeat of press releases and lead generation and really start to communicate with their market.  And that makes it hard for the PR folks to adopt social media practices… oe even effective communications strategies.  Even Gary Smith has said that the PR pros in EDA are some of the best there are in the business, but the EDA industry as a whole really has no respect for communications professionals either on the PR side or on the journalism side.  That’s why it is in the state it is in now.

What passes for social media is exactly what you described: a new avenue to post press releases.  But that practice does not embrace the real strength of the medium.  An ethical practitioner would not only tell the client (or employer) that fact, but would refuse to continue to get paid for doing something that just doesn’t work.

When you are selling underwear, believing the customer is always right is not a bad way to do business, but when you are tasked with making a client successful, you better have a backbone.

Rick: Given the proprietary and confidential nature of most design projects, are there natural limitations to the adoption and use of social media among engineers?

Lou: Most proprietary and confidential labels put on the projects have been placed there for no other reason than that someone said they should be.  If you have a patentable idea, then patent it.  If not, someone else has probably figured it out before you did.  The software world has known this for years and because they openly share their technology issues with each other, they are more successful and profitable than the semiconductor and EDA industries.  So the primary natural limitation on engineers using social media is conventional wisdom.  Sometimes you need to step outside the box.

However, what most people don’t realize about social media is that it doesn’t have to be open to everyone.  You can limit who is in your circle with a couple of clicks of a mouse.

Let me be very clear here, we keep referring to engineers like they are a monolithic group.  It isn’t true.  In fact, in the past 10 years of working with engineers from multiple disciplines, I find the EDA engineering community to be the most paranoid and insular of all.  When the economy was booming and people were throwing money at EDA companies with little regard for profitability, it was not hard to ensconce yourself in a hermetically sealed jar.  That time is over and, guess what, it isn’t coming back.  I think I can wrap it up with one of my favorite quotes from Helen Keller.

“Security is an illusion.  Life is an adventure or it is nothing at all.”

Learn that, get used to it and your life will be much more satisfying.  And if you have a hard time getting your head around it, call.  Our rates are reasonable.