Great coverage Laurie. I see some great things ahead in the social networking arena. It's certainly been a standard reference tool among specialists in various medical disciplines. The only caution that comes with it is in the area of propietary information and that must, must, must be handled by policy set by those who are responsible for corporate ethics. Notice I didn't say corporate/legal or HR. I believe we may see an emergence of a new area of expertise in organizational management since ethics involves such a vast range of issues. Social media may very well be the thing that raises the necessity level for that speciality.
prabhakar_deosthali - I agree with your statements. My other concern towards this generating any useful information is the engineers that work for companies that not only are trying to get a jump on the market that are involved in projects that have patents involved and proprietary information. Making suggestions through twitter or other social media wouldn't allow meaningful results without potentially violating a company’s privacy policy and put the company’s project at risk.
So I would have to agree if you are looking for a simple market study you can do that through social media. If you are trying to gain a competitive ground or possibly find a missing link to the project you are working on I don't see where this could be helpful.
Yes, Barbara. I'm not certain about Salmon, specifically, but the technology you want is called "buzz monitoring" or "reputation monitoring." There are many tools available today that allow you to monitor what's being written and posted across the Web. You can sort of do this with Google Alerts, but there are many more. In fact, Marketing Pilgrim has listed about 26 free tools.
After reading Al Maag's blog and Laurie Sullivan's, I came up with a question I'd like to pose to the industry: is there a filter for social media? In other words, if I use Salmon, can I set it to alert me when certain users post, or certain topics are discussed? That would go a long way toward cutting through all the drivel.
Being able to get ideas and suggestions from all over the world through the social media is fine, But when a company is deciding a particular strategy for its product distribution or marketing or for the sourcing of components, it would not like to make it public as it may be the USP of that company to gain more market share. So the real original ideas and strategies will never appear on these social media. All that will appear will be in my opinion some harmless discussions which normally lead to nowhere. What will be published onto these media will have already lost its competitive advantage! So what's the use? except may be the student community can learn a few things out of such content.
Laurrie, social medias are one form of networking to the engineering community and it offers lots of flexibility also. Anybody can join and share their ideas and view through this type of forums. Lots of peoples and marketing research companies are taking advantage of such forums for gathering information. But here the main drawback is about the genuinty of the opinions; one can drive the polls or discussion in a wrong way also because they are not providing the identity (sometimes with a fake identity also).
So the only fruitful way, it can be used for companies to broadcast their messages to the community regarding the release of any new products or sharing technical details. More over sharing of any critical ideas through such a social media is not advisable.Another important aspect is privacy of the data’s/opinions gathered through such medias. So personally am against of sharing any type of critical details in any type of networking or social medias.
Personally I believe we left social media "era" and right now we are going to a sort of natural evolution, I mean the need to carry out through one single stream informations from multiple social sources. I mentioned within a different post for example "cotweeting phenomenum".
Reporting to you my experience, as professor I can say students preferences are really vaste and several ways from them to reach me for asking support or suggestions are in place; it is not easy to manage messages/tweets/and so on coming from different platforms, so my personal opinion is Salmon could potentially help us a lot in your job in the future.
I can see a benefit to social media if indeed Salmon does what it proclaims. My biggest issue with social media right now is that it is too fragmented. There are too many options to post/blog from and that can get time consuming. If a user picks one over the other, then he may not be linking to the right people. If the comments are linked no matter where they post from, that could be quite useful.
So, it begs the question why Google has not moved forward faster with this???
Absolutely, elctrnx_lyf. I agree that engineering is more about innovation and arriving at the perfect solution, rather than access to available information from suppliers and part. That's why I think more engineers will tap social sites for ideas. The Twitter handles I provided in the post are from engineers who do just that, tap social for ideas, sharing theirs and gaining new ones.
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Join EBN contributor Jennifer Baljko on Thursday August 23, 2012, at 11:00 a.m. EST for a live chat on how electronic manufacturers in Thailand have shored up their supply chain to reduce the impact of future natural disasters.
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