This post is not about PROFIBUS or PROFINET; it’s about using social media for “marketing.” Engineers are warned to continue reading only at their own risk.
Walt Boyes, Gary Mintchell, and Jim Cahill are twittering (or is it tweeting) from ISA’s 3rd Annual Marketing & Sales Summit. (Visit www.twitter.com and search on their names. Or look at Jim’s slides from his keynote or Walt Boyes’ blog from the event.)
Eric Murphy created some animations to “break some OPC myths.”
Chris Brogan blogged about the business benefits of social media.
Jeffrey Henning is blogging a lot about “Community 2.0”
Me? I’m just struggling to find the time to blog occasionally. I have a backlog of topics, but I also have a day job.
I’m playing with Twitter. I created one podcast (called it a PROFIcast naturally). I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook.
I try to follow everything that happens in industrial automation. I subscribe to Control Engineering, Automation World, Control, Industrial Ethernet Book, and Control Design. I get eNewsletters from each of them (and others). I use RSS feeds for every automation blog I know of plus some marketing ones (and, of course, a couple Arizona Diamondback blogs). I use Google Alerts to point me towards any reference to PROFIBUS, PROFINET, competitive technologies, and more.
THE BIG QUESTION: Do enough people in our industry pay enough attention to make blogging, twittering, podcasting, animating, etc. worthwhile? When we do our one-day training events I emphasize the further resources that are available including 3 RSS feeds from our website. I usually ask how many are using RSS and the answer is usually zero.
The story is told of the potato famine migrants to the US from Ireland: there was no work for them here, but they earned enough to survive by “taking in each other’s laundry.” Are we (Walt, Gary, Jim, Eric, and I) just preaching to the choir. [Add your own cliché here.]
Are we connecting with anyone that we really need to connect with? Are all the engineers too busy engineering to pay attention to us?