Posted @ 10:06 AM on January 18, 2010 by admin
A Break with Branding Tradition
By Beth Goodbaum
A few of the most prominent social networking sites are already within their five year anniversary mark, leaving B2B marketing leaders with a choice: go with the flow or stay the traditional branding route. As manufacturing web pages gradually undergo format changes from simple text to videos and links to networks, it’s clear that some businesses have embraced social networking as an ongoing public relations strategy. Yet plenty of others are questioning whether all the effort is worth the results.
“Social media and social networking tools are just better representations of technologies that we’ve been working with for over a century,” Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, a new media marketing agency says. “Shunning (social media) is shunning quality communication.”
Brogan, who co-authored “Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust” began working in social media networking back in the ‘80s, when bulletin board services were the leading way to connect with clients.
Social Networks and How Marketers Are Using Them
With the emergence of more recent social mediums, like LinkedIn, which launched in ‘03, Facebook in ‘04, YouTube in ‘05, and Twitter in ‘06, trade businesses have more marketing tools to choose from than ever before. While these are a few of the leading networking sites, other popular networking tools include podcasting, streaming video, and RSS technology.
Networks like Facebook, which supplies “fan pages” and Twitter, which allows businesses to stay in touch with clients via Twitter news feeds, are a good starting point for many small businesses by building business loyalty.
“White label social networking platforms allow for a place for people with unique information and skill set needs to gather privately and share industry specific information,” says Brogan. “Tools like YouTube allow for video information sharing and tools like the Flip camera enable simple video creation and sharing, so that field teams can convey more than simple textual and voice information,” he says.
Channellock, Inc., a pliers manufacturer based out of Meadville, Pa., that was named manufacturer marketer of the year in 2009, attributes much of its success to social media platforms, like a Facebook fan page, a BlueBoard blog and a Twitter handle.
“The biggest advantage of being relevant in social media as a manufacturer is having a direct line of communication to the people who use and enjoy (our products). It affords us the opportunity to ask questions and get answers,” says Michele King, the Communications and Training manager at the company who helped implement social media sites last year.
King says that Channellock’s social networking platforms has drawn in visitors from all walks of life, including plumbers, electricians, farmers, HVAC technicians, contractors, mechanics, handymen and home DIYers.
A meeting of the minds from those in various industries is a crucial factor in successful social networking, Brogan suggests. “Sharing information across these new toolsets provides organizations a chance to speed the information sharing process, to enable collaboration, and to empower multi-contributor environments, where people with mixed skill sets can collaborate better.”
Advice for the Critics
Yet with all the success stemming from social media networking, some companies, primarily Fortune 500s, and even smaller businesses, have been slow to conform to the social mass marketing trend, according to marketing studies. Many may determine that the social networking route simply takes too much time and for some traditionalists, too much effort.
For those with such a mindset, media experts like Brian Solis and Deidre Breakenridge, who wrote “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR,” suggest hiring a community manager. By doing this, they advise that there will always be someone representing the company “in all things social with complement new PR.”
“I think many businesses will choose to skip using social media and social networking for some time,” says Brogan. “That’s fine. They can pick up the opportunity later. Their competitors, however, probably won’t wait around.”
Posted @ 12:35 PM on February 22, 2010 by admin
With the prospect of near-term baby-boomer retirements, manufacturers today face a need to transfer knowledge to a younger generation of workers. And as automation vendors and manufacturing software suppliers look to help meet that need, there are signs that today’s social networking tools may be primed to play a role.
At Emerson Process Management (www.emersonprocess.com), the Austin, Texas-based automation supplier, for example, product engineers are looking toward collaborative systems such as plant “wikis” to help their customers ease the transition to a new set of workers. A wiki is a type of collaborative software program that typically allows Web pages to be created and collaboratively edited by a community of users.
Plant wikis
Emerson plans to incorporate various plant wikis as part of its future control and simulation training systems, enabling operators, engineers and others to add information and knowledge that can be accessed by other users, says John Caldwell, Emerson’s DeltaV product marketing manager for Advanced Control and Simulation Products. The plan is part of an overall initiative at Emerson focused on “Human Centered Design.”
“We’ve got some mini Wikis going into our alarm system for our next release so that we can capture actions to take during alarm situations or during normal situations,” Caldwell says. The concept will be expanded in future control system releases, he adds.
Another example comes from IFS North America Inc. (www.ifsworld.com/us), an Itasca, Ill.-based supplier of component-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology. The company on Dec. 14 said it is releasing results of a study showing that manufacturers want more integration between social networking tools and their ERP systems—and more social network-like, enterprise 2.0 functionality.
They want it
The study, conducted for IFS by a third-party research organization, found that while 40 percent of survey respondents said that ERP and social networking integration was extremely or very important, the vast majority indicated that they wanted their ERP system to help them perform functions typically associated with social networks and other Web-based collaboration tools. A full 62 percent of respondents said they wanted their ERP system to “capture and record the knowledge of senior experienced engineers and professionals so that it becomes part of your corporate knowledge base.” Among manufacturers with more than $1 billion in revenue, 72 percent said they wanted this capability.
“Enterprise 2.0 and social media tools are designed to draw information out of people, to get them to talk,” said IFS North America Chief Technical Officer Rick Veague. “This will become more of a business-critical issue as the current generation of senior manufacturing operations and maintenance professionals prepare for retirement, only to be replaced by a smaller, less experienced but more technologically sophisticated generation. Wikis, threaded discussion boards and other features of social media will become common fixtures in enterprise software—including IFS Applications (the company’s ERP product).”
According to Dan Matthews, chief technology officer at IFS AB, the company’s Swedish-based parent, IFS is taking seriously the challenges presented by the aging and shrinking workforce, and is introducing functionality to address these needs. IFS has already evolved IFS Applications in this direction with its new usability-enhanced interface, IFS Enterprise Explorer, which includes embedded search tools and knowledge capture devices including “sticky notes,” which allow users to informally add and edit comments to any record.
Outside wisdom
“We have been told that IFS is fairly unique in that we operate a Web 2.0 community for our users,” Matthews said. “We are planning to integrate this community directly with the applications so that our customers can access the wisdom of users outside of their organization as they learn the finer points and more advanced features of IFS Applications. We are also working to structure our embedded help information not as static documentation, but in the format of wikis, so that our customers can document their business processes and indeed, capture the knowledge of senior people in a format that has lasting enterprise value.”
The IFS study was based on a survey of more than 260 manufacturing software decision makers. IFS North America plans to release an in-depth report on the findings before yearend.
Emerson Process Management
www.emersonprocess.com
IFS North America
www.ifsworld.com/us
