Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Social media’s rising impact in the engineering world

Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

Perhaps because I blather on about it, Suzanne Defree at EDN asked to write a piece about what’s going on regarding social media in the electronics engineering world. She posted the story last week, and I haven’t had a chance to call it out because I was out of the country (Costa Rica, where sand and sun and egg-laying turtles are higher priorities than social media).

Getting from here to there

Getting from here to there

The story (“EEs, vendors search for their voice, and answers, in social media”) offers a glimpse at what’s going right now in our corner of Silicon Valley. Clearly the pace is picking up, both from vendors and EEs carving out niches for themselves as domain experts in design tools, embedded systems, analog etc.

I lead off the story with the engineer’s paradoz: The people who helped invent the platforms that make the digital world so useful are generally the last to use them. But I think the time has arrived.

Consider Denali’s “EDA’s Next Top Blogger” contest. There are 10 people on that page, but that’s only the fraction of the bloggers out there.

Consider vendor-as-publisher, a topic I’ve written incessantly about. That’s picking up steam. Companies such as Synopys, Xilinx and National Instruments are just a few of the many that have gotten with the program.

In June, I blogged about work going on at Analog Devices on the social networking front.   Since, EDN has posted the article, I’ll post some more detailed take-outs based on my interviews with others for that pieces–folks such as Harry Gries (Harry the ASIC Guy), Gayle Bullock at National Semiconductor, Jeff Hardison at McClenahan Bruer and Deirdre Walsh at National Instruments.

And then in two weeks, I’ll be participating in Synopsys’ unique “Conversation Central” program at the Design Automation Conference, which Karen Bartleson outlines in a recent post.

The tide has finally turned in the electronics industry, and all hell is breaking loose.

Pretty interesting times, these.

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  5. Salivating over Social Media

Category: Electronics, journalism, marketing, public relations, social media
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Comments

One Response to “Social media’s rising impact in the engineering world”

  1. Lou Covey
    July 18th, 2009 @ 8:16 pm

    “Hell breaking loose” is right. I made an fairly innocent comment that when the engineer bloggers start having to face the onslaught of “marketese” in meetings at trade shows that its going to be a rude awakening for some of them, and you’d think I’d insulted their mother. As bloggers become more and more the mainstream media of certain industries, they are going to find themselves handled and flat out blocked from access to the engineering compatriots they’ve enjoyed relationships with.

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