Author Archive

The channel that gets to close our series on how social media helps engineers is YouTube. The only social media platform that we never hear anyone complain about or say they would never use is YouTube. Why is that you ask? Because everyone loves video! If you don’t have a Facebook page, refuse to open a Twitter account and are happy with your rolladex of business cards instead of LinkedIn, we still bet at one time or another you were on YouTube and enjoyed it.

YouTube isn’t just for funny home videos, music videos and movie trailers. It is a great place to learn and see things you would otherwise never have the chance to.

YouTube is especially great for engineers because it is a source for many valuable videos including how-tos, product demos, technical reviews and technical answers to questions you just can’t seem to solve.

Below is an example of a video that engineers could find useful. In the video MCCI explains how to migrate your drivers to USB 3.0 designs on Synopsys USB 3.0 IP.

If a picture can say a thousand words, then a video can say a million. YouTube allows companies to take you places you wouldn’t normally be able to go.

When you are watching a video on YouTube and realize that it has over a million views, I’m sure sometimes you think, wow, how did that happen? Well that is the power of YouTube. If people find the content valuable, for whatever reason that may be, people are going to share that content with their friends, family, co-workers and so on and so forth. A YouTube video can become viral very quickly.

Unlike some of the other channels, YouTube is very straightforward. If you can figure out how to record your own videos, you will definitely be able to start your own personal channel on YouTube. Finding videos is also extremely easy because it is just like any other search engine.

Everyone loves a good video. They are much easier to digest than an article or even a podcast, so YouTube makes it easy for you to share them whenever you find one you like on any channel you like.

What is your favorite part about YouTube?

This concludes our series on how social media helps engineers. Is there anything we missed that you would like us to touch on or anything you would like us to explain more? We would love to hear from you!

When we talk to engineers about social media, most have a basic understanding of what LinkedIn is, what Facebook does, and how great YouTube is, but many openly admit that they do not understand Twitter. Most people have the misconception that Twitter is just people talking about what they had for breakfast and miss the value that Twitter brings. For this post, not only are we going to explain how Twitter helps engineers, but we are also going to explain some of the Twitter jargon, since many find the platform somewhat obscure and confusing to use. Twitter is a very powerful listening tool that also has an extensive reach, if you know how to use it.

We suggest that the best way to figure it out is to start using it. Once you have a Twitter account, observe how other people are using it. Start searching for people and keywords. You’ll find that Twitter is a great way to get news, share content and keep up with anything and everything you are interested in. Twitter is a great place to stay up to date with what is going on in your industry. By following key influencers, you can set up a feed that alerts you to the very latest content and the most up to date news.  Give it a try. Go to the search bar on Twitter.com and search some keywords like “engineering” and see what people are talking about.

The key takeaway of this post is that Twitter is not just about what you had for breakfast. Twitter is a source of endless knowledge that you can digest while you eat breakfast each morning. You just have to know how to tap into this knowledge. Inside Twitter, you can find topical conversations and a great deal of shared information. We only listed a few examples above because the possibilities are endless.

On Twitter you can follow people who you already know or those you think just have something interesting to say. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, you do not send requests to be “friends” or become a “connection”, you simply follow people or companies that you are interested in hearing from and interacting with. By searching different topics, you can see the people that are talking about them and the conversations that are developing.

Now let’s talk about the 140 character limit. Every tweet you make should be adding some kind of value and with the limited characters, you have to think of the most important thing that you want people to know. You might have to word tweets differently then you would if you were saying it out loud, but with practice, the 140 character limit actually helps you to be a more relevant and concise writer.

It is good practice to make sure that you are @mentioning a company or a person when you talk about them in a tweet.

A retweet is almost like forwarding an email. When you see a tweet that you like, or a tweet that you would like to comment on, a retweet allows you to do this and share it with your followers.

You can send a direct message two ways, either by clicking on the “message” button located on the top of a person’s profile (button looks like small envelope) or by starting a tweet with the letter “D” followed by the person’s username (without an @ symbol).

As mentioned briefly, one way you can find information and help your tweets to be found is by searching for and using #hashtags for topics.

A #hashtag is a great way to make sure that your tweet gets a farther reach then just the people who follow you. Anyone who is searching that particular #hashtag will also potentially see your tweet.

For more details on how to use Twitter, read Twitter 101: How should I get started using Twitter?

@YouWhoReadThis Thank you for reading. Have questions or comments? Please share your thoughts below. #twitter #engineers #engineering

Like we discussed in our previous post, we are going to expand on the presentation that we showed during DAC 2011 and take a deep dive into each channel we mentioned and explain how they benefit engineers.

Below is a presentation that we created on how blogs help engineers through sharing and collecting knowledge, fostering relationships and being available in a real time, easy to find environment.

Did you learn anything new from our presentation? Are there any other ways you think that engineers could utilize blogs? We are here to answer your questions, if you would like us to expand on any of our points please don’t hesitate to ask.

Next week we will be sharing our presentation on how LinkedIn benefits engineers. Stay tuned!

Many of those who have AT&T’s residential DSL High Speed Internet have probably already heard the news that AT&T is putting a monthly usage cap on their broadband service. The average AT&T customer will not be affected by this. In fact, only the top 2% of users may be affected. Interestingly though, this group of customers use about 20% of the totally capacity of the network.

According to AT&T their average customer uses only 18 GB per month. This means that 150 or 250 GB is more than enough for 98% of customers. However, if you are in the 2%, you will be charged $10 for every 50 GB over your usage allowance. AT&T is being courteous though, giving users a grace period of 2 months to change their usage habits, and then subsequently will begin to charge overage fees.

Although we understand why internet providers like AT&T and Comcast have a cap on their broadband services, we can’t help thinking about who might be included in the top 2% and how their communication and business habits might be affected. Being that we are Social Media Specialists, we sympathize greatly with the large amount of social media consultants and contractors that work out of their homes. Since going over your usage relates greatly to how much you upload and download various content, we feel that any social media contractor, or any individual working out of their home may be affected by this.

On the non-business side, others who may be affected are those who do not have cable television and instead stream all of their movies and regular TV shows from the internet. Some groups of college students may be affected as well, such as film production and photography students who may frequently upload and download large files.

Another issue that could arise with this new usage cap is the increased importance of network security. Although most people already have their wireless networks password protected, there is now an added risk if they do get hacked with the addition of overage charges.

Internet usage caps like the ones we just described can also have an influence on less obvious areas. GigaOm, who posted a similar article about the issue, expresses how caps like these may potentially hinder innovation.

Here is a chart provided by AT&T that breaks down what you can get out of you allowed monthly usage.

What are your thought on broadband usage caps?

We had the privilege of interviewing one of the most well known, respected and influential figures in new media (basically a celebrity to us), Brian Solis. After seeing Solis speak at TWTRCON San Francisco in 2010, we discovered his original creation, the Conversation Prism. The Conversation Prism visually articulates the organization of the social web. We knew that gaining insights from Solis would be invaluable and relevant to our goal of effectively communicating with engineers and educating ourselves and others about the ever-changing state of the social media environment.

Brian Solis is the author of Engage, the complete guide to build, cultivate, and measure success in the social web. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing. He is principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups. BrianSolis.com is among the world’s leading business and marketing online resources.

(Please see end of post for key takeaways)

Darcy & Hannah: We were very intrigued by your Conversation Prism. Can you please share with us why and how it was created?

Brian Solis: My post introducing Version 3.0 of the Conversation Prism has a very deep view into the why and the what. In the comments section of the post someone had asked for the first time ever, “Why is it called the Conversation Prism when it looks like a color wheel? If it has nothing to do with a prism, why is it called that?” That’s the first time I had been asked that, so I decided to address it because there is a reason. It was originally a prism because of the way a prism works—it is a refraction of light. The Conversation Prism was a play on “light” and “enlightenment”. Instead of taking the conversations that are happening on the social web and looking at them as one stream from an audience, run it through a prism; it bends the light so that you can see the light refract, and therefore see all of its separate conversations taking place. That was the premise of the Conversation Prism. We eventually had to put it into a circular format because after the first round of research, there were too many players to fit in the design of the original prism. If you can envision what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album looks like, which was basically a prism, that was the original concept for how the original Conversation Prism would look and work: one light bending into the prism that was tiered from top to bottom. There are just too many solutions out there, so it had to become circular in order for it to make sense.

The inspiration behind the Conversation Prism was two-fold. One was that it was to visualize the social media universe. At that time, there had been an attempt to do just that where people were saying, “Show me all the networks for imaging, show me all the social networks, show me all the networks for music,” etc. Of course at the time, the popular ones were YouTube, Pandora, Facebook, Twitter and everyone seemed to attack it the same way. They would start in PowerPoint and create a slide to depict whether or not a business should be present in all networks, which was a popular theme several years ago. Another motive for these social media universes was to demonstrate the need to pay attention, because it was a big universe. I decided to bring a little more structure, or intelligence, to the understanding of the social web to demonstrate that consumers/individuals were using social networking in ways that could be compartmentalized. It was organized by how they were using these types of networks, hence each of the categories. The second inspiration for it, was to then say, (and this was in direct argument against all of the people saying you needed a presence in every one of those networks) “look, these are the four tools. Each one of these networks has a search box where you can use traditional Boolean logic search techniques to figure out whether or not that community was active for you and your market.” Using the Conversation Prism as a template, you should go through it and try to see where you customers are active, so you can put together a social map of where you should focus your attention and prioritize based on the results that come back. It also serves as a foundation or blueprint for how businesses should listen to conversations and put a structure around it. In fact, many listening tools today will tell you that they use the Conversation Prism as their framework for putting together their listening systems.

(http://www.theconversationprism.com/)

Darcy & Hannah: In your blog post titled, “The Business of B2B Social Media”, you stated that “B2B. . .is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time.” Elaborating on this, how can B2Bs, in general, apply the Conversation Prism to their efforts and their strategies?

Brian Solis: It’s interesting because I get a question similar to this a lot . . . It’s usually asked this way: “Brian we always see examples in B2C, but what’s the real play for B2B? How do B2B’s get something out of social media?” I stop and think, “You know what, I actually understand what you are talking about. Everyone is talking about the same examples over and over again: Virgin America, Starbucks, Dell.” I have this saying, this motto or mantra that is, that I really just encourage people to read the success stories of how people are using social media today, how businesses are increasing sales and attracting customers. At the same time though, you can’t make any assumptions that these successful companies had a strategy plan, had metrics going or anything like that. At the end of the day, every business is unique, the culture is unique, the market is unique, the conditions are unique. The answer for B2B is the same as it is for B2C, and it brings us back to your first question. The Conversation Prism is designed to get you answers, it’s designed to tell you what, when, where, how, why and to what extent. Most people approaching social media right now do not have those answers. Even those who are listening, monitoring and reporting on what they find, they’re still not able to tell you what the top-down strategy is and what the exact goals and predicted outcomes are. Most only know that that they want more fans, more friends, maybe some coupon redemption, maybe some sales or conversions, but really what we need to be looking at is “What is it that you want to know? What is the outcome? Where is this activity taking place? Who is leading that activity? Who are the influencers? Really, what you do to figure this out is you start to reverse engineer. So for business-to-business, I do the same thing that I do for business-to-consumer or the government. I go and research and try and figure out everything I need to know beforehand, and that is the big element that companies are missing in a lot of this. Many are reluctant to study between the lines and do the research. We’ll use a monitoring tool to say, “Ok, there were 4,700 conversations on Twitter this last quarter, 600 blog posts with mentions and the sentiment was 80% negative, 20% positive, and 60% neutral.” That doesn’t tell you what your social network strategy should be, it just tells you what is. The idea is to pull the dashboard off, get under the hood and start to see what people are saying and feel it. What are those negative sentiments all about? Where are they coming from? How is this conversation segmented throughout your organization? Are they for sales, for customer service for lead generation? Is this for marketing, for product development? And then you can really get a lay of the land and start to emphasize what you see, what you read and what you hear, because it’s really that which should inspire what your program should be. So for business-to-business the only thing that changes is the answers to who, what, where, when, why and to what extent? That tells you where you need to focus.

I’ve been hired by B2B companies in some of the most verticalized industries, only to find that there is always some level of online activity that is worth at least paying attention to. It’s funny because the ones that are really gung-ho about socializing don’t want to hear that their activity isn’t warranted or merited on Facebook or Twitter. They’re hoping they can bring a personal touch to their brand, because they are on the same platforms as individuals. Many times though, I have to tell them that they have no business being on Facebook or Twitter right now.

Darcy & Hannah: We find that reaching engineers (our customers) through social media to be very challenging. It seems like many have not adopted the use of popular social networking sites. Can the Conversation Prism be more specifically applied as a road map on how to communicate with engineers?

Brian Solis: It’s true for a lot of B2B companies, and even some B2C companies, it’s just too early. You know they’re going to be there, but why spend the time and resources cultivating a community that isn’t there. Time is finite. Money is finite. You need to focus where attention is focused, and in some cases that is in user groups and forums, and in the Conversation Prism there’s a section for those. There are master search engines in forums and groups that at least show you if anybody is talking about the space or the market. But in all reality, you see a lot of business-to-business companies, and even some on the business-to-consumer side, who are not using social media, are starting to leverage their email and newsletters to promote their presence and to start to attract audiences in order to force them into using specific domains which, in some cases, is working. At the same time it’s like fishing, you don’t necessarily know if you’re in the right spot, or if you’re going to catch anything with the right bait, so sometimes it’s just paying attention to where the early adopters are, and those early adopters are usually in the blogosphere.

Darcy & Hannah: Do you think for things to change, that it’s going to take Generation Y moving into more decision making roles?

Brian Solis: I think so. I think it’s a little bit of many different things, for example, this is not unlike the challenge that the art industry is facing. If you look at the local ballet company in your city, you know they live off of ticket sales and donations. Their whole business infrastructure is around emails, newsletters and events to try get people to donate and attend events, and those who do have generally been an older demographic. The organizations in this industry are freaking out because their target market is getting older, and organizations are saying, “wow, what do we do? We’re losing our source of income.” So, simultaneously they have to create a second augmented strategy to go after the younger individual so that they can start to cultivate their interests in the arts. In this case your hybrid is the blogosphere, because people are being sent links to posts that might be worth their time via email, so you’re still getting eyeballs outside of traditional media into this gray zone that helps people start to figure out what social media is all about. Usually at this level people are connecting through interests, not relationships, and interests would be around whatever industry you’re in. Now the second thing that I’ve learned about what inspires people in this direction is the social object, you have to give them some reason to pay attention, and that social object in many cases is a blog post. Another is video, for instance, a YouTube video is a social object. We did a project with a B2B robotic arm manufacturer whose customers were looking for automation solutions for workflow and work-lines. The company would create these videos to show what the robotic arms were capable of doing in a real life setting, which were just short snippets of things that were remarkable, and they would put them on their YouTube channel. Then, they would optimize the videos for social media with keywords, descriptions and links. More importantly they would take those social objects and reach out to bloggers, not A-list bloggers, but peer engineers that were sharing their thoughts and looking for solutions, and say, “I was reading some of your posts and decided to create this video that we thought addressed XYZ, here you go, feel free to share it if you like.” We would start to see these videos get 70,000 to 80,000 views because bloggers were taking the embed code of the videos and writing a post around it. That got this particular industry and other industries that I’ve done the exact same thing with, moving in the direction of engaging online, and some are still not on things like Twitter, but it got the conversation started.

Darcy & Hannah: On a slightly different note, where do you see social/new media in the future, say five years down the road?

Brian Solis: I realize that I don’t know that I have an answer to this generally or conceptually, and I really try to stop thinking about it that way. I’ll tell you where I am thinking about it though. Five years from now, the way people are connected to one another will change, today it’s about relationships. How you social network today is nothing like how you network in real life. In fact, you as an individual maintain maybe six to ten life groups; there’s your professional group, your family, your tennis club, your church, your best friends, but you don’t network the same way online. In fact, the way you network online today is exactly what we have accused media properties of doing wrong for so many years; broadcasting one to many, to one audience, and that’s exactly how we’re using social networks now. Five years from now, we’ll be far more sophisticated in what we share, where we share it and why we share it. Understanding at some level that this contributes to a digital persona that we will define online intentionally, it’s not what we’re doing today, but a few years from now it will be intentional, and that intentional persona that we create is going to affect us in the real world too. It’s going to have an impact on the way we see ourselves and act. Now on the business side, businesses are also going to mature as they understand the idea of how influence plays a part in information consumption and sharing, and they’re going to, as individuals are, be much more cognoscente about their role in all of this. They have to understand this in order to earn a position of authority, rather than trying to woe people all the time. It’s not scalable that way. You’ve got to make people want to come to you. Those two concepts working together will create a more enriched and complicated experience, but one where we are in control of the findings. That’s what the end goals look like, but I don’t know what that visually looks like five years from now.

Darcy & Hannah: What do you believe will happen to the skeptics of social media who are holding on to the idea that it is a useless trend that will eventually go away?

Brian Solis: The market for skepticism is finite, and one of the reasons I talk about Digital Darwinism quite a bit is in this exact example. The skeptic will become extinct before they ever realize that they were wrong.

Quotes & Summaries

We’d like to thank Solis, for lending us his time and brilliant professional insights. Looking back through the contents of this interview, we’d like to highlight some key takeaways:

• The Conversation  Prism is a map designed to get you answers by pointing you in the right direction to help you find the what, when, where, how, why and to what extent, but you have to jump on the research road
• “The answer for B2B is the same as it is for B2C. . .”
• “I go and research and try and figure out everything I need to know beforehand, and that is the big element that companies are missing in a lot of this. Many are reluctant to study between the lines and do the research.”
• You can’t just look at the quantitative aspects that come out of your social media efforts, you need to dig deeper and figure out, “What is it that you want to know? What is the outcome? Where is this activity taking place? Who is leading that activity? Who are the influencers? Really, what you do to figure this out is you start to reverse engineer.”
• “You need to focus where attention is focused”
• “You need to figure out who the influencers and early adopters are”
• “The skeptic will become extinct before they ever realize that they were wrong.”

Have you used Brian’s Conversation Prism in a B2B setting? Share with us!

We have come to the final post featuring our interview with Professor Buford Barr. As past students of Professor Barr, we both remember the lecture that he gave us on creating a personal brand. This lecture may seem irrelevant to some, but it has turned out to be one of the most valuable things we learned in college. Professor Barr is very passionate about this topic and did not disappoint us in this section of the interview.

Darcy & Hannah: One of the things that we really appreciated you teaching us was the importance of creating a personal brand. How would you advice an individual working in a B2B (specifically with engineers) on how to form their personal brand?

Professor Barr: When I started my career, I joined, what at the time, was probably the finest engineering company ever, General Electric. Not only did GE have a strong engineering tradition, but they also conducted their own research and development. Everybody in sales and most people in marketing were engineers, so I very quickly had to learn how to communicate credibly with engineers and I had to learn how to take technical information and turn it into advertising, public relations and brochures. You’ll hear companies today say, “You need to take the technological information and translate it down to your target audience,” but this was not the case for me. My target audience was brilliant engineers! They didn’t need anything toned down. They needed the right information that they could see would meet their needs and their wants. So my challenge was, “How do I understand what that is?” I learned to communicate with engineers. I had a little technique that worked quite well for me which was that everywhere I worked, I would go find an engineer that could speak English (something besides engineering), and I befriended them. I would take them out to lunch, I would take them out to drinks, whatever it would take, and they were my source. I could go to them and say, “Joe, what are the primary benefits of this device? Talk to me about this. Why would somebody want this product?” and they would tell me, and then I would be able to talk about it intelligently. Then I took some engineering type courses and tried to learn more about it. If you can’t speak engineering, you are not credible. You will not be respected if you are not credible and do not understand, and therefore will not have a strong personal brand. I think going into high-tech scares a lot of students off because you do need to learn a little bit of something about technology so that you can have some kind of value added.

Everything about positioning and branding a company also applies to an individual. When people hear, “Darcy” or “Hannah”, what comes to mind? Is that what you want to come to mind? What can you do about it? If you don’t brand yourself, the market will. You have to position yourself, and you have to build your own personal brand. You do it by how you look, how you act, how you interact with people. That’s why personal branding is so important. They have to know who you are, and it has to mean something. It’s not just awareness. Awareness just gets you into the game. One of the failures of the dot-com era was that everybody thought that name awareness was all that you needed, but you have to have an immediate perception to go along with that. When you hear a name like, Nike or Toyota, what’s the word that pops in your mind? How pervasive is that word? Is it the right word? “Unreliable” is probably not a word you would be looking for. In building a personal brand, what are the properties that go into the one word that you want people to think when they hear your name, and those are the characteristics that you adopt. Remember that you’ve got hard skills, but I was reading the other day that soft skills are really what people want today, and it’s what differentiates you from everyone else. Your personal brand needs to be managed, you can’t just let it lie along on the ground as you go. The bottom line is that personal branding is exactly the same as corporate branding. It’s the same effect, it’s the same strategy, same process, same everything. You need to sit down and figure out your personal brand strategy and write it down. You need to go through the same exercise of positioning yourself as you would for your corporation. Then you have to deliver on that brand promise.

This post concludes our three part interview with Professor Barr. He has really helped both of us to form our personal brands, and if you have not given your own personal brand consideration, we hope that this post will inspire you to start now!

For those who have worked on creating your personal brand, what has been your strategy and what efforts have you made?

We both had the privilege of taking a course from Professor Buford Barr during our time as students at Santa Clara University. In our opinion, Professor Barr is by far one of the best professors at SCU. His professional experiences and teaching methods are exceptional. Perhaps what leads to this is that he truly loves his students. The level of care he holds for each and every one of his students, past, present and future, is very evident.  As a professor, mentor, and friend, Professor Barr played a huge role in our success as students at SCU and now in our careers at Synopsys. We knew an interview with Professor Barr would give an excellent insight to communicating with engineers from both a professional and academic standpoint.

H. Buford Barr is a Lecturer in Marketing for the Leavey School of Business as well as a Lecturer in Communication for the College of Arts & Sciences at Santa Clara University. Professor Barr currently teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in marketing, marketing communications, and public relations at Santa Clara University where he has been associated since 1989. In 2008 he received the Extraordinary Achievement in Teaching and Service Award from the Leavey School of Business. This was Professor Barr’s second recognition in Extraordinary Achievement as he received the award in 2006. He was recognized by the students of SCU’s Accelerated Co-operative Education Program (ACE) with its ACE 2006 Outstanding Faculty Award and named faculty advisor in ’08. Barr’s professional career includes senior marketing positions at Actel Company, Sunnyvale, CA; Signetics (now NXP Semiconductors), a division of N.V. Philips; McCann-Erickson Advertising/Dallas where he established the office and was responsible for the worldwide marketing communications for Texas Instruments; and prior to that he spent fifteen years with the General Electric Company in New York and Connecticut. He was graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Marketing and completed graduate studies in Communication.

(Our interview with Professor Barr consisted of three topics, which we will feature in a three-part-post over the next three weeks)

Darcy & Hannah: As an individual who worked in corporate marketing and communications for over 30 years, how have things changed and how are they still changing in your perspective? More specifically, what are some things that college graduates today, who only know the technology era, may not realize about how corporate communications was carried out in the past?

Professor Barr: Long before President Obama’s campaign, change has been a major part of this country and our business life. It’s happening faster, and more significantly than ever before, especially in communication technology.  The key understandings in corporate communications and marketing (what we are trying to do and what we are trying to achieve) has not changed at all. How we execute it, and the tools and techniques we have are changing by the hour! They have changed significantly since the mid-1990s, and the growth of the internet, Web 2.0 and social media. The role that the internet has played has put the power and control in the hands of the consumer.

When I was running the McCann-Erickson office in Dallas, working with Texas Instruments, we controlled all of the information about Texas Instruments. We allowed information to go out when we wanted it to, we sent it to certain people when we wanted to, through advertising, through press releases, through direct mail, through brochures, through tradeshows. We controlled the information. Today, the consumer, the engineer, controls all information and all access. They control when they look at it, where they look at it, how long they look at it and who they value the most. So now, our job has moved from really almost trying to manipulate a target audience to now providing meaningful, interesting, relevant, up to date, transparent, accurate content that is valuable to our target audience.

Darcy & Hannah: Do you see a lot of pros and cons to the changes?

Professor Barr: It’s reality! I think there are going to be a large number of unforeseen consequences coming out of the internet, Web 2.0 and social media, I really do. How are we using these tools? I think as far as using the internet today, we are using it for personal entertainment most of the time. Facebook has people spending 700 billion minutes a month on their site (Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). Now I say to myself, “What if all that time was used for something productive, what if that time was used to save our cities, our states, our nations, our world’s problems?” The number of hits some kid gets falling down the stairs on YouTube is sad. I believe the internet and social media have so much potential, but I don’t think the internet and how it’s being used is leading us to more innovation.  I think its leading us to having fun with information we already know, rather than generating new information. Right now does it matter? Maybe not, but I think long term it will.

The big thing is that the consumer rules. So you have to determine how they prefer to get their information, what information they want, how to make it available to them and how to develop yourself into the source people will go to for that information. That’s the trick. We used to control that by running ten ads instead of five ads and that’s the way we measured our media, who was the biggest advertiser, and who created the best read ads. Today, in one of my classes, one out of 45 students knew the value of Facebook ($50 billion). Students do not read anything in print, and it’s getting worse and worse. To me, that has been the biggest change, but we are still trying to understand the customer, we’re trying to deliver value that is profitable for the company and is hopefully done in an ethical and socially responsible way.

Please tune in next week to see what Professor Barr thinks college graduates must know to be successful in a B2B!

What do you think about the changes that have occurred in marketing and communications? We’d love to hear from you!

So you’re probably wondering what is wrong with your browser, because not only is Rick’s face gone, but it has been replaced by those of two young women.  Well, we are happy to inform you that you are still at The Listening Post where you can get insights into the G2G industry. Yet a new perspective is upon you.  Please allow us to introduce ourselves: Darcy Pierce and Hannah Watanabe. We are both recent Santa Clara University marketing graduates and new additions to the Synopsys team.  Having been born and raised in the Silicon Valley and grown up in the technology era, for us social media has forever been the norm.  It is our desire to take this unique perspective, educational background, and creative spark to benefit our customers and partners who enjoy reading The Listening Post.

Hannah Watanabe & Darcy Pierce (Photo by Leah Watanabe)

When you get a new job, it is not unusual to walk in on your first day and not know a single one of your co-workers, let alone your teammates.  Perhaps it is destiny, a small world, or just good old networking, but we are not two random gals arbitrarily teamed together to continue the success of The Listening Post when Rick passed us the torch.  On the contrary, we actually met in a social media class while attending Santa Clara University. In this class, we worked with two other team members to create a social media program for a local business. The success of our efforts ignited a passion within us of the power of social media.

Hannah participated in an internship with Synopsys over the summer, and after being offered a full-time position, she was informed that a counterpart to her role was needed. So here we are, living the dream, doing the exact work we always hoped for and collaborating together.

What’s the future of the Listening Post? As the founding father of this blog, Rick Jamison said, “A conversation, of course, is never one-way (that would be a monolog, aka traditional marketing). Whether a conversation includes two or many, listening is half the equation – the part where learning happens as new insights are heard and understood… At Synopsys, listening G2G (geek-to-geek) is an essential part of the mission as we use the Internet to build online communities around shared interests.”  With these wise words as our foundation, we will continue to interview experts in the field as well as offer you insights into the trends and strategies being used today, with a specific focus on G2G (geek-to-geek) communication.

We both look forward to having you read our blog and to receiving your feedback. Which guests and topics would you like to see on the Listening Post? We would love to hear your ideas! Please feel free to send us your suggestions to TheListeningPost@synopsys.com or add a comment below.