Lion Associates

Last Wednesday morning in Stuttgart, trade editors gathered at a special press conference hosted by Edmund Optics at the Vision Show in Germany. The purpose was to introduce to the industry the European winners of the EO global grant program. The award program recognizes outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at non-profit colleges and universities, and attracted over 900 global applicants. In each of the three geographic regions, namely Asia, the Americas and Europe, three winners were selected. Included with the grant for the European winners were invitations to attend and present their research at this press event.

Editors were invited to the press event to informally meet the researchers and learn about their specific R&D projects. The projects were varied covering imaging in agriculture, the development of nano-imaging tools, and optical systems to improve techniques such as optical tweezers. The presentations captured the interest of the editors, culminating in an exciting question and answer session with the winners.

This ongoing global program was charged with disseminating to the Industry information that is being performed by R&D PhD programs in universities around the world. Several positive effects resulted from this effort – the credibility of the university is enhanced, the researcher’s work is brought to a broad audience, and the industry has another pool to draw from for research or employment.

Industry tends not to think about researchers in academia as viable candidates for employment in industry. It’s not that their research or abilities aren’t respected, it is more the simple notion that they are in academia and that is where they will stay. The reality is that there are many PhDs who would jump at the chance to move into a commercial environment but it doesn’t prove easy to get themselves and their research real recognition. To have an opportunity to get into a business intern program would also be a winning situation for all. An interesting statement was made at a luncheon I attended with the winners that, at least in Spain, there are no intern programs so there are no opportunities to experience a true business working environment.

This brings me back to my new phrase — SHARING OF KNOWLEDGE IS A POWERFUL TOOL — one that will open the doors of industry to those that are performing innovative and life changing research. If industry will seek and expand on intern programs, the advantages will bring forth enumerable rewards for all concerned.

Sharing knowledge is power and that really is sharing the wealth.

To learn more about the winners and their projects or for more info on the upcoming Edmund Optics Global Grant Program, please visit http://www.edmundoptics.com/market-solutions/promotions/grant-program/

One of the most bewildering aspects of online marketing communications is the sheer diversity of engagement formats. Today, it is possible to connect to customers via everything from traditional display ads in online publications, such as Vision Systems Design, to mass social media, like Twitter. Choosing the right format for your product mix, customer profile, and staff resources is critical, but poorly understood. I’m going to try to cut through the fog a little bit by looking at three formats that I’ve had particularly extensive experience with: catalogs, blogs, and forums.

It is important to recognize that these aren’t mutually exclusive. You can combine, for example, a blog with a forum, or stub either of them off a catalog website. You can also start with one, and add to it as time goes on.

A catalog is an e-commerce website consisting of a writeup for each product on offer. Visitors find these writeups through some sort of indexing scheme. Each writeup provides a link to a page that allows visitors to order the product, and pay for it via credit card, PayPal, or a similar mechanism. Setting up and maintaining catalog websites can be a lot of work, but less expensive than establishing a distribution system through brick-and-mortar outlets. The advantage is that visitors to your website are self-selected for affinity to your products, and readiness to buy. The disadvantage is that the catalog itself does little to differentiate your company’s products versus the competition. A particularly good example of a catalog website is the one for Edmund Optics. [http://www.edmundoptics.com]

A blog is an often-updated series of short articles about a subject that will be of interest to your prospective customers. Blog entries should not focus on your products, but on the technology behind your products.  One format that I’ve had particular success with is a question-and-answer blog. A good example is Ask Control Engineering. [http://www.controleng.com/blogs/ask-control-engineering.html] This format is particularly attractive to engineers who might have problems they could use your products to solve. Another format publishes essays about how your technology addresses issues your customers might wrestle with. An example is my personal blog. [http://www.cgmasieyeontechnology.com] Of course, this blog is of the same type.

Forums allow visitors to engage in back-and-forth discussions of issues of importance to them. Often, one visitor will start a “thread” by asking for advice, then others will add to the thread by attempting to answer. Again, engineers particularly like to engage in these kinds of discussions online, which mimic what they often do in real life. The Control.com [http://www.controleng.com/blogs/ask-control-engineering.html] is a particularly good example of this format. Companies can get good exposure by hosting such forums, and providing on-staff experts to help provide answers.

The most important consideration in choosing among such formats is the resources available in your company. While you can hire a third party to set up a catalog website, your company has to provide the product descriptions and come up with ways, such as weekly promotions, to keep the site fresh. Similarly, a blog will fall flat unless you have a technically savvy writer to post interesting entries weekly – at minimum. Perhaps the most demanding is the forum, which requires someone to review visitor entries as they come in, and only allow the most interesting to go live on the site – and filter out malicious comments.

I started this entry with the idea of defining Social Media, but got hung up on thinking about what makes a source authoritative. That happened when I did a quick Internet search for a definition. The first one I came across was from Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia: “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. The term refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.”

That reminded me of every comment I’ve heard in the last ten years about online literature searches. The first source, or one of the first sources, that comes up is Wikepedia. Almost everyone I know that says anything about this site, however, pans it. Whenever I try to pin down any of these critics about what’s wrong with the site, they say something vague about how the information sourced comes from many diverse sources, and anybody can contribute to the site, so that makes it somehow not authoritative.

My response is “Bull Cookies!”

NO source is authoritative.

I can say that as a trained scientist and veteran journalist. I’ve researched hundreds of subjects through all kinds of literary sources, and never found one I could actually trust as far as the end of the library’s work table.

You can’t believe anything you read. It’s all written by someone, and that someone has an axe to grind because everyone has an axe to grind. Everyone also has limits on what they know. And you don’t know what that axe is, or where those limits lie.

All you can do is look at the background of your source, the information that source provides, and its agreement to information provided by competing sources.

Does the author have the background to know what he or she is talking about on that subject? Are there any conflicts of interest? Does the information provided seem credible given what you already know about the subject? Does the information agree with existing independent sources?

These are questions you have to ask about information you gather from any sources. Online sources are no different. Wikipedia is no different. This blog is no different.

What we’re calling social media have a special problem. By providing self-publishing tools that are easy to obtain, and easy to use, we’ve lowered the bar for anyone who wants to portray their opinion as fact.

That, however, has not changed the problem for anyone trying to decide whether to believe something they’re being told. The problem is the same. The fact that you, as the information consumer, need to do some work to verify the quality of the information you consume is the same. The tools and techniques you have for verifying the quality of that information are the same. And, the strategies you have for verifying the quality of that information is the same.

The right approach is not to look down on the information you obtain from social media sources, or to accept it blindly. You have to look at all the information you have from all the sources you have, then make a judgment about what you will accept and what you won’t.

The fiction of “authoritative sources” is wishful thinking by people who are too lazy to do the work that real critical thinking requires, and hope for some mystical “authoritative source” that will always give them accurate information.

To paraphrase a saying popularized by Robert Heinlein:

THERE AIN’T NO SUCH THING AS AN AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE!

Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane.

Think back to when you were a kid. Think about the advertisements that really made you sit up and take notice. TV commercials are especially good for this exercise because they often incorporate jingles that are, especially for young ‘uns, hard to drive out of your head, so you involuntarily rehearse them over and over.

Ten, twenty, even thirty years later, you can still remember the dang things like it was yesterday. Twenty somethings and thirty somethings don’t realize how long these memories last. We older folks have a lifetime of this trash cluttering up our gray cells, with no way to get rid of them. They just sit there, waiting for some lout to trigger them. Just hearing a phrase from one of those awful things is enough to  bring them out, where they clatter around, tripping ordinary thoughts that try to make the journey from one side of the brain to the other.

“Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat….”

“N. E. S. T. L. E. S. Nestle’s makes the very best ….”

“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is ….”

I’m not cruel enough to trigger any more of them, but you (if you’re old enough to have been tortured by these three in the first place) get the idea.

Now, think about the products these things were used to sell. Think about how many you still expect to see on the auto parts/supermarket/department store shelves? Do the companies still exist? Do you know? Do you even care?

That’s right. You don’t even care!

Any of these things that’s more than a year old is ancient history. They become movie props (e.g., as a running gag in the 1993 movie Demolition Man [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/] starring Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone). Products come and go, companies come and go, and advertising messages come and go. Once you’ve got the jingle exorcised from your consciousness, what I call the “take-home” message (Where’s the Beef?) is gone with it. With that message goes the company’s share of mind, and your desire to seek out their products.

If your company is the sales leader in its field, and you have enough orders to fill your production capacity for a year, you’re still hanging by a thread. You still have to keep pushing for your share of your customers’ minds because, if you don’t, someone else will.

When you stop advertising, you’re handing your share of your customers’ minds to the other guys. A year from now, your company’s name will be filling in the blank when your customers ask: “Whatever happened to ­_________________________?”

You’re starting to see them everywhere – little boxes like checkerboards but with random-looking patterns. These are the Quick Response codes, a 2-dimensional version of the barcode that smartphones with the right app can decode. Simply snap a picture of the box and the smartphone will open a web page linked to the code.

The QR code can be reproduced in any print media, allowing marketers to link advertisements to web pages without requiring the customer to type anything in. Not only does the QR code add a new dimension to ad campaigns by giving readers a quick way of responding (obtaining more information or maybe placing an order) but it gives marketers valuable feedback on how their ad campaigns are performing. The codes can be structured to reveal their source to software monitoring the web page’s access, allowing marketers to track the effectiveness of specific publications, geographic regions, or virtually any other distinguishable attributes of a given advertisement.

The QR code is a great tool when targeting younger consumers that are enthusiastic users of smartphones and similar technologies. They love the convenience and instant gratification as well as using it just because it’s cool. When marketing to an engineering audience, however, the use of QR codes may require a different approach.

Talking with some of our engineering contacts we gathered several important clues about QR codes. One is that traditional engineers seem less inclined to use their smartphones, if they even own one, as extensively as do recently graduated engineers.  That may be because they have well-developed information-gathering techniques that predate the smartphone and there seem to be few compelling reasons to change approaches.

Then there are concerns about what the screen on the typical smartphone can display. Detailed information about advanced technologies is difficult to read on a 4-inch screen when it was originally formatted for display on a 15-inch monitor. “It’s too hard on the eyes,” said one of our contacts.

On the other hand, our engineering contacts indicated that they might find the approach quite useful at trade shows. Being able to get some basic information without having to wait to talk with someone at a show could be a big help zeroing in on what to investigate in depth during an engineer’s limited time on a show floor.

So, here are some suggestions when using QR codes in technical marketing. First, take advantage of the code’s ability to provide feedback on your print marketing campaign. Second, realize that the users of these codes from among your customer base are more likely to be the younger crowd – at least at first. You may want to start using them on products that junior engineers have authority to buy and work up to ads targeting senior engineering and management as the use of QR codes becomes more mainstream.

Third, ensure that the web page the code links to is easily read and adaptable for mobile apps. Make sure the page provides the information promised but trim it down to essentials and keep formatting simple. You can always provide an option for the user to request more details be sent to an e-mail address once the essential information has stimulated interest. Avoid asking for an address up front, though, as it may alienate the customer who thinks he’s being tricked.

Finally, look for situations like the trade show where the simplicity and ease-of-use that QR codes provide give them a compelling advantage over traditional practice, or where the code use provides an opportunity that didn’t exist before to trigger immediate customer action.  Engineers will use QR codes when they provide a significant benefit.

A few decades ago, I worked with one of the best publishers I’ve ever known: Roy Forsberg, who was then publisher of Test & Measurement World, and a vice president at Cahners Publishing Company. For anyone not familiar with the way the magazine publishing business is organized, the publisher – ostensibly the head of the entire business unit – is really the chief advertising salesperson. He or she spends the vast majority of time on managing the sales side of the business, and relatively little managing the rest.

One day, Roy showed me a little poster he’d had made up for the kickoff of the magazine’s annual sales meeting.

“Nobody knows
about your company
or your product.
Now, let’s talk about advertising.”

What happens to companies suffering under the “Nobody knows about your company or your product” curse?

They don’t sell anything.

If they don’t sell anything, they have no revenue. If they have no revenue, they don’t have a company.

Here, I’m lumping under the umbrella term “advertising” all methods of getting the word about your company out to your potential customers. In the early nineties, that meant display advertising. There were few other viable options. Today, we have display advertising along with what many people are now calling “social media,” which boils down to everything else we do on the Internet to promote products.

Many businesspeople, when considering the cost of advertising, try to compare incremental cost of advertising with incremental increases in sales. That doesn’t work because advertising does not provide incremental sales. It simply provides sales, period.

There is no formula that relates increases in advertising to increases in sales. It doesn’t work that way. Advertising does not buy you increased sales. It buys you what Roy used to call “share of mind.” When your company has its share of your customers’ minds, your customers consider buying your product.

No share of mind = No sales

Not getting your company and its products face-to-face with your customers results in zero sales. So, the proper comparison is between the incremental cost of advertising and total sales of your company.

Some folks like to think that because they’ve had robust sales in the past, they already have their share of customers’ minds. We’ll talk about that next time.