Except for the keynote presentation given by Lee Bryant from Dachis Group, all the presentations were in Finnish. I was one of the speakers at the event (video in Finnish is available here), and I published a generalized version of my presentation in this blog post just before the event.

In this post, I will take a look at what the other speakers had to say.

Opening speech, Jorma Turunen, CEO of The Federation of Finnish Technology Industries

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Avaus Jorma Turunen, Teknologiateollisuus from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

Just a few words to open the event, remarking that a similar event was held one year ago and people were clearly just learning this thing back then, and that he hopes to see measurable benefits that would further encourage companies to use social media.

Social media in manufacturing – introduction to the pre-study report and review of the past year, Harri Lakkala, CEO of Intosome (social media consulting firm)

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Harri Lakkala, Intosome Oy from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

I have previously written more about the pre-study report that Harri briefly discusses in this blog post.

Social media in the Savo region in Finland, Juha Anttila, CEO of HT Laser Oy

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Juha Anttila, HT Laser Oy from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

HT Laser is a metalworking subcontractor (CNC machining, laser cutting etc.) with an annual turnover of around 43 million euros.

Their thoughts on social media:

• Social media must not be an isolated island
• Social media needs to be measurably beneficial. And if it is, it must be used!
• HT Laser uses social media internally between offices and with partners. They also plan to extend their use to external use.
• First project carried out in social media: number of emails sent below 10! Email replaced.
• Goals – reduce lead times, speed up R&D, reduce costs, keep customers informed, reduce travel costs, improve brand
• Social media is compatible with Lean
• Social media is a tool that gets the message through to younger employees

Information security in a cloud, Antti Tassberg, Senior Information Security Manager, Nokia Oyj

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Antti Tassberg, Nokia Oyj from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

• Information security managers can encourage use of social media, find ways to use it safely, not hinder people
• Using clouds requires planning: compatible IT architecture, security requirements, location of personal data (in which country is this information stored!)
• Offline access to cloud, backups – some companies have lost data! Which is not good, as you can guess.
• Choose your cloud service carefully, think whether the company will still be around in five years
• Information security is an enabler that enables achieving the goals management sets

How can social business help European manufacturing, Lee Bryant, MD Europe, Dachis Group

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Lee Bryant, Dachis Group from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

This one is in English, unlike the other presentations.

• Manufacturing not impacted by social media in a major way yet
• Manufacturing is very important for Europe, need to find ways to use social media
• Meetings, memos, cascading hierarchies are inefficient ways to organize work
• Return on invested capital is shrinking, profits are not based on real value
• You can design structures that get better as the number of users increase (Google, Wikipedia)
• IT is ripe for re-invention, internal systems do not face the same competition as consumer products
• Computers should be used to augment human intelligence, not replace it
• 5 big trends: mobile (personal, any device), cloud (computing as a utility, anyone can set up servers easily), consumerisation (work experience has to be brought up to match home experience), big data and social analytics (harvest data and improve business), social (on the inside, not just the outside)
• People are more important than the process
• Various cases: Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Rheinmetall AG, BASF
• Tips for European manufacturing:
• Focus on quality for global brand recognition
• Ecosystems of suppliers and partners – social can help a lot here!
• Long tail markets, special widgets can be sold globally, even if the local market is small
• Customer intimacy to build loyalty
• User-generated products
• Post-digital world
• Mass customization
• Nordic companies are still bureaucratic even if the organization is already more flat
• Activity streams are adopted more easily than tools you have to go to

Quality manual and work instructions wiki in a small machine shop, Lassi Otranen, CEO, Reifer Oy

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Lassi Otranen, Reifer Oy from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

• Reifer environment: small machine shop, batch size 1-2, thousands of products, how to manage data on what has been made and how?
• Quality system existed in Word since -99: far from practice, not really in use in production. Put it in a wiki!
• Quality manual updates discussed in weekly meetings
• Computers at all workplaces, work instructions are easy to access when starting work
• Creating the culture to save all information in wiki is still a work in progress, even though much has been achieved

Wärtsilä in social media, Amos Ahola, Senior Manager, Communications & Branding, Wärtsilä Oyj

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Amos Ahola, Wärtsilä Oyj from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

• One year ago, Wärtsilä was thinking about what to do with social media, how a big B2B company can use social media
• Current Wärtsilä vision, all employees are able and willing to use social media in daily business
• To use social media, you need to know your business goal and know how to use social media
• Wärtsilä on Facebook, content for employees and potential employees
• On Twitter, Wärtsilä aggregates content about themselves and follows relevant news, 1400 followers
• Wärtsilä in LinkedIn, targeted marketing, recruitment
• Wärtsilä’s internal use of social media, Q&A forum that is accessed through intranet

The path from hype to business benefits – the phase and development of the social media phenomenon, Samuli Savo, Director, ICT-intensive strategies, Consulting, Market-Visio/Gartner

Sosiaalinen media teollisuudessa – Samuli Savo, Market-Visio/Gartner from Teknologiateollisuus ry on Vimeo.

• Social media in companies is a billion dollar business in 2012
• What companies look for in social media: #1 strengthen customer relationship, #2 enhance brand awareness
• In this seminar, information sharing was the most talked about goal. Manufacturing cares about all aspects though.

In this post, I will examine one of the most important social media tools for companies, an internal wiki.

What do you want – information

The lack of correct and timely information is a problem that is ever present in companies. The larger a company grows, the more severe the issue becomes. In a large corporation, it is nigh impossible to know what everyone is working on and what competencies everyone has.

The results are many, none of them good:

• Duplicate work, because people do not know something has already been done.
• Inefficiently assigned resources, because all competencies are not known.
• Reduced sales, because the company is not aware of all the available resources.
• Reduced innovation, because people who could create something great together do not meet.

Why does this happen and how could a wiki help? First, we need to take a little peek into sociology, namely, strong and weak ties.

The strength of weak ties

In 1973, Mark Granovetter published his classic paper, The Strength of Weak Ties. In this paper, he argued that weak ties between people are essential to understanding macro-level events.

The strength of an interpersonal tie is defined as “a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.”

Granovetter goes on to argue that people often share the same strong ties: if A and B spend a lot of time together, and C also spends a lot of time with A, it is likely that C also spends a lot of time with B. Thus, people who share the same strong ties form a group.

Furthermore, groups of people are connected to other groups of people through weak ties. These are not usually shared, so each group of people is connected to a number of other groups over a variety of weak ties.

In order for ideas to spread, they must do so over weak ties, because the strong ties are confined to small groups and the ideas need to pass on to many groups in order to spread.

Strong and weak ties and social media

I do not claim to have made the connection myself. In fact, I became aware of Granovetter’s work through Andrew McAfee’s book, Enterprise 2.0.

McAfee recommends wikis for work carried out with people with strong ties, for example, for collaborative writing.

However, I will present use cases that suggest that wikis are an excellent tool also for people with weak ties, perhaps even more so, because harnessing the power of weak ties is crucial for information sharing within large corporations.

Internal corporate wiki use cases

Let’s take a look at some of the ways internal corporate wikis can be used. These use cases should give you some ideas on potential applications in your organization.

Many of these use cases derive their utility from the improved utilization of weak or potential interpersonal ties.

Internal phone book. Who is this person? What does he look like? Do these questions sound familiar? Most corporate wiki platforms include user profiles. So, go ahead and create profiles for all the employees, complete with phone numbers, job descriptions, and photos. Taking the photos for the phone book can even make for a nice event!

Meeting minutes and memos. Instant sharing of all meeting minutes to participants and all stakeholders with the ability to comment, discuss, and modify them. Extend the influence of your meetings beyond the conference room.

Recreational activities and sign-ups. Many companies organize or encourage the employees to organize various recreational activities. Move the planning and sign-ups to a wiki, and people will catch a glimpse of work issues on their way to sign up for a barbeque.

Idea contribution and discussion. Create a space and template for submitting new ideas and feedback. With new ideas appearing in a wiki, a much larger portion of employees are exposed to them, which results in more discussion and more varied points of view. Wiki may even work as a serendipity engine that brings together people interested in similar development project, but who work in different units and have no other way to get to know of each other.

Research and development. With R&D data in a wiki, it is possible to easily see what kinds of development projects are ongoing and what has been tried before. This can be of substantial benefit later on, when information on attempted solutions and reasons why some alternatives worked and others did not are easily searchable.

Internal knowledge base. Whether it is about maintenance, support, or development, moving your know-how into a wiki makes it easily searchable and usable.

Business intelligence. Maybe one of your engineers saw a new competing product, or a part or solution that could be used to enhance your product. With business intelligence in a wiki, you dramatically increase the number of potential observers from a few people working on it to your entire workforce. Similarly, a wider range of your employees become aware of competing solutions and their relative strength, which helps them in their work, whether it is sales, marketing, engineering, or service.

Collaborative writing, reviewing, and commenting. Perhaps the most traditional use for a wiki there is. Author documents together, or use it as a review tool: for example, write the text of an upcoming brochure and let the stakeholders comment it in a wiki, thus ensuring full exposure of all comments and allowing people to agree or disagree with suggestions as they are presented.

Making the wiki work

Alas, things are not as simple as launching a wiki and then watching the events unfold in an explosion of edits and comments.

It takes work to make a wiki work, although not as much work as you’d spend on information sharing without one.

Wiki needs to be easily accessible. If it’s difficult, people won’t bother. Preferably, the wiki should work on single sign-on so that no separate credentials are needed for accessing the wiki.

All use cases need an owner. The owner is a gardener and an evangelist who looks after that part of the wiki and encourages others to contribute.

Move as many thing as possible to in-the-flow. Another concept I picked up from Andrew McAfee, this one originates from Michael Idinopulos, who writes that “In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself … Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do.” In effect, people will contribute more when the contribution is a part of their work instead of being an additional step.

Information sharing powerhouse

A corporate wiki is a hugely potential tool for effective information sharing, which in turn can provide a significant boost to productivity.

I can’t really come up with arguments against implementing a corporate wiki, except for one: if your company culture is built on restricted access to information, a wiki might not be an ideal tool. The fewer secrets there are, the better a tool a wiki is.

This does not mean that companies cannot have any secrets. Quite the contrary, the board of directors might do well to have a restricted wiki for their own use: they are busy people and being able to write down their thoughts to the correct audience whenever they have the time can help them manage their workload as well.

Photo: William Murphy (infomatique) on Flickr (cc)

Unlike his previous books, this one is not about social media, but instead about speaking in public with a special focus on how startups should present their products at conferences.

Steve Jobs wannabees and lessons learned

One of the lessons in the book is that you should consider your audience. This is demonstrated admirably by the book itself, as one of the first stories is about Steve Jobs, with many more to come. When addressing technology startups, talking about Steve Jobs is a sure way to get their attention!

There are multiple lessons learned from the stories on Steve Jobs, with one of the most important ones being that no one should attempt to simply copy his style: it is important to see what others are doing and apply those lessons while remaining yourself.

Storytelling versus Powerpoints

The book advocates a storytelling-based approach to presentations as contrasted with a Powerpoint-based approach. This is not much of a surprise, as Shel Israel is one of the most captivating storytellers there is. It is important to note, though, that he does use Powerpoint, just not as an all-encompassing solution.

Storytelling is an integral part of the entire book. Stories about Steve Jobs’ successful (and failed!) presentations, Kennedy vs Nixon, Jerry Kaplan, Robert Carr, Munjal Shah, and many others form the bulk of the book. The stories are interesting, captivating, and fun.

There are also a couple of stories about Shel Israel’s own experiences, and I would have liked to hear more of them, because they are truly unique to this book, and deeply enlightening because they let you peek inside the speaker’s head in a way that third-person stories do not.

Speaking coach

In addition to the stories and the insights drawn from them, the book includes advice on considering your audience and goals, structuring your speech, resolving common problems while giving a speech, and, importantly, having fun when giving a speech.

Short book

Stellar Presentations is a short book. It took me less than two hours to read it, and that left me craving for more. On the other hand, even the busiest entrepreneur should be able to find the time to read it.

Mediocre editing and layout

Shel Israel has always advocated the stance that message is the key and grammar and spelling are of minor importance, but still my over-pedantic mind was not satisfied with the quality of editing and layout in this book.

There are typos, grammatical errors, varying spacing between paragraphs, chapters starting from the middle of the screen, and even varying font sizes. The errors are frequent enough to catch the eye, although there are not errors on every page.

There is also a mystery chapter on lethal generosity, which is itself an interesting concept, but I do not see how it is connected to speaking in public. A careful editor might have ditched the entire chapter from the book.

Overall, the book would have been better if the final touch had been more careful and thorough.

Conclusions

Shel Israel is a great storyteller. His writing is always a pleasure to read and the stories he tells are always intriguing and fun.

Stellar Presentations is a good book. However, it is not quite at the same level as Twitterville. With more careful editing, it could have been a great short book. With more careful editing and a bit more length, it could have been a superb book. As it is, it is just good.

If you speak in public, it is worth reading, because it offers a fair amount of practical advice from an experienced speaker. The price is a bit steep, especially for countries other than the US that use Amazon.com, where it costs $13.79, but the advice contained within is nonetheless worth it.

Photo: My personal copies of Stellar Presentations, Twitterville, and Naked Conversations.

Social reading for consumers

One of the forerunners in bringing social reading to the masses is Amazon with its Kindle profiles and direct interaction with authors. Another is Subtext with its annotated copies of ebooks.

With certain devices or apps, you can already share what you read with your connections on social networking sites and engage in discussions on specific passages. However, the future applications I’m most interested in here concern private sharing within very limited groups.

Social reading within companies and research groups

Universities have libraries. Many companies have some sort of libraries. If these libraries were electronic instead of physical, and complete with social features, the reading experience and efficiency would be forever altered.

Consider the following scenarios:

• Ability to search the contents of the books and the contents of any notes and highlights, including who made them. For non-fiction, this is huge: say you need one detail of tax law or a solution to a particular engineering issue, and a colleague has needed that same detail before and left a note in the book to help find it again, perhaps even with further instructions on the particular application – the ability to search for the detail and for the comment can save a lot of time.
• Ability to share notes and highlights in real time. For an academic research group working on, say, Kant’s metaphysics, this can transform the time spent reading into a social, more interactive experience and provide a huge boost to efficiency because insights are rapidly available for use and evaluation.
• Ability to post passages and notes to social networking sites. If you can post to company’s internal social networking solution, you can easily share important findings with people who have not yet read the book, or may not even intend to read it at all.

The change

The result of all of the above is more efficient information flow, faster spreading of new ideas, increased conversation on the contents of the books, and improved insight into the past of the company or research group: the ability to find out who found which issues relevant and why and how the ideas have evolved.

The significance of this will vary depending on the field. For literature-based fields, such as philosophy, this is a complete game-changer. It may not be as huge for some other fields, but new ideas always serve as catalysts for improvement, and increasing the number of new ideas is therefore always important.

Photo: My Kindle, taken after writing this post

The show I started watching is The Big Bang Theory. It is an entertaining nerd sitcom that I highly recommend. The show is currently on its fifth season in the US, while in Finland only three seasons have been aired so far.

Products money cannot buy, but you can get for free

So, first I went ahead and bought the DVD box set for seasons one to four. After that I ran into problems when I wanted to watch the fifth season, of which 10 episodes have now aired in the US.

While there are numerous options on how to buy the episodes online if you happen to live in the US, I could not find a single online store that would sell me the episodes to Finland.

If I lived in the US, I could have purchased a season pass to get all new episodes as soon as they are released, and get them stored in a cloud so that I could watch them on various devices. These are great new features, but unfortunately on a very limited market only.

So, two hours of searching for an online store proved futile. Now, let’s examine a completely hypothetical situation in which I had no P2P software installed and no specific knowledge on the current state of P2P besides general tech savvy. In this completely hypothetical situation, it takes one and a half hours total to find proper software, install it, download ten episodes of a TV show, find subtitles for these episodes, download them, and copy all of that to a USB flash drive and start watching it on a TV. If I already had the environment set up, it would take mere minutes.

I have been in the working life for years, so money is not an issue, definitely not when it’s about a few dozen bucks. However, I do value my time, and after wasting a fair bit of it looking for a legal alternative, I am quite pissed at the entertainment industry.

It is an instant, global economy now

This is all part of the communication revolution that online and social media have brought about. I didn’t dream of getting TV shows at the same time as the US back in the 1980s. Nowadays, if they are not available legally, they can be acquired with hardly any effort for free. Times have changed!

A global business model for the entertainment industry

It is important to note that a global business model is not simply a matter of taking the services that already exist in the US and spreading them around the globe. Yes, that is part of it: season passes and cloud services are more than welcome. But this business model can be improved upon.

Copy the DLC business model from the video game industry. DLC, downloadable content, refers to additional content for video games distributed through the internet, usually for a small fee. This business model would suit the entertainment industry very well. For example, they could have sold me the episodes of The Big Bang Theory at the same time as in the US, and then offer, for example, Finnish subtitles for a small additional fee at a later date when they are available. There really is no way I would pay full price again just for the subtitles, as the current business model insists, but a small fee could work.

Ditch the region-based business model. “This content cannot be sold to your current location” is a phrase I became very familiar with while looking for the new episodes. Seriously, this just is not working in the instant, global economy. All digital content has to be made available everywhere at the same time, or people will make it available for free. Translation takes time, local voice acting takes time, that is a given. However, these should be available separately when they are ready, and the original version should be available instantly for those who rather enjoy it straight away – they should be given the option to upgrade their purchase later on with local subtitles or voice acting, if they so choose, perhaps for a minor fee.

There always seem to be copyright infringement trials related to P2P networks going on these days. Based on the above, one major reason for this is simply the obsolete business model used by the entertainment industry: when people have to turn to P2P because many products are simply not sold to them, the barrier to turn to P2P for other products is lower as well.

Picture: The Big Bang Theory season 5 poster (fair use)

In this post, I will examine various types of guest posts and the benefits they offer for the post authors and the blog hosts.

Benefits of guest posts for the host

One reason for authors to write guest posts is marketing. However, the host also needs to receive some benefits from publishing guest posts, otherwise this practice could not have begun.

One major benefit is that guest posts reduce the workload of the host while maintaining a steady publishing schedule. This is especially useful for daily blogs, and good examples of popular blogs that utilize guest posts to keep publishing content at a steady pace include {grow} and Problogger. Hey, it might even let these guys have a vacation sometime.

Another benefit is that guest posts bring up different points of view on your topics that you could not have written yourself. Want to have an important hub? Give your readers more than they know to ask for.

Furthermore, guest posts are social networking. Even an A-list blogger can benefit from making friends, having them contribute over at his blog, and contributing in their blogs in turn. The exposure to slightly different audiences can be beneficial for both. Furthermore, being social does not have to be about benefits: guest post opportunities can be offered to friends for no particular gain.

One benefit that is less commonly sought is that guest posts by recognized experts increase the credibility and traffic of your blog. A good example of corporate use of this is the American Express Open Forum that includes contributions from people like Guy Kawasaki and Shel Israel.

I realize that some people consider guest posts to be essentially free, and would not consider paid contributions to be guest posts at all. However, I do not think this distinction is necessary or even particularly useful: a guest post is simply any post by a visiting author. If the host considers the benefits important enough to pay for a guest post, that’s perfectly fine.

However, I don’t think this applies the other way around. Guest posts where the author pays the host for a chance to publish a guest post can be extremely harmful, as they either are advertisements in disguise or will be suspected of being such.

Guest posts as a marketing method for new authors, established bloggers, and even companies

The traditional use of guest posts is for less known bloggers to post on a more popular blog, which allows them to gain access to a wider audience and possibly gain more readers for their own blog as well, because guest posts usually include a short description of the author and a link back to the author’s blog.

Guest posts do not have to appear only on highly popular blogs. Guest posts on less popular blogs can also be beneficial, both through the audience as well as SEO benefits, and guest posting between less popular blogs can even turn them into more popular blogs.

Usually, the road to writing a guest post starts by building a relationship with the host, for example, by commenting regularly on the blog in question. Cold calling can work too, but popular bloggers receive so many pitches that it is unlikely.

Guest posts can also be utilized as a marketing method for established bloggers or even companies. For established bloggers, this can take the form of writing a guest post over at another blogger’s blog, and having him contribute to your blog in turn.

As the corporate world has come to realize the influence of blogs, corporate attempts to gain guest post opportunities are on the rise. However, I would recommend against cold calling, especially by companies. Whereas a cold calling individual blogger may seem inexperienced or ignorant (or even succeed and get to publish a post), a cold calling company almost invariably comes across as pushy.

Companies can build relationships with bloggers, but these relationships have to be created by real people, not brands. Guest posts can be a part of a thought leadership marketing strategy of a company, but the thought-leading individuals need to establish their credibility first, whether by blogging, participating in discussions, or out there in the offline world. Without some previous credentials, guest posts by company spokespersons do not come out as authentic.

Guest posts as social networking

Writing guest posts can help deepen the relationships you have with other bloggers. This may bring about new readers or income, or it can just help you make some friends who are interested in the same things as you are.

Guest posts as freelance gigs

If you are famous enough in your field, you may even get paid to do a guest post, for example, for a corporate blog that attempts to establish its credibility or for a regularly published blog whose main author needs a hand.

Guest posts and copyright

When publishing a guest post, it is important to agree on copyright. Unless otherwise agreed, the author of the post owns the copyright.

Most large sites that accept guest posts have a set of guidelines you agree to in order to get your post published. The most important ones are agreements on whether the post has to be previously unpublished (it usually does), whether you can republish the post elsewhere (you usually can’t; unless your submission is rejected, of course, in which case you can do whatever you want with it), whether the host is allowed to edit your post (usually yes, however, major changes may need your approval), and where the host is allowed to publish your post (usually in the blog you submitted it to, but not, say, in a book).

Here are some examples of guest post submission guidelines: Michael Hyatt, 12most.com, and kikolani.com. As you can see, the answers to the above questions vary.

It should also be noted that if you get paid for a guest post, the copyright may belong to the company that hired you (copyright of works made for hire). Then again, if you do get paid, there should be a contract that makes this clear.

Do not be intimidated by copyright issues. It is merely good sense to be clear on what you are agreeing to so that there will be no bad blood in the future should the author or the host desire to reuse the material.

Guest posts are not for every blog

Well, I can’t really think of any good reasons for a blogger not to write guest posts. Copyright issues are something to keep in mind, and lack of time can be a reason too, but there are so many good things about guest posts that you should certainly consider them.

However, the same can’t be said for all blogs. Some blogs are simply written in such a way, with such a clearly identifiable voice, that guest posts would look really out of place in them. Some examples that come to mind include Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik and Seth’s blog by Seth Godin. Still, even Seth’s blog has published at least one guest post. No, that does not mean it is a good idea to try to make your post the second one.

Other reasons to write or publish guest posts?

What do you think about guest posts? Are there still other reasons to write or publish them? Are they a useful tool for you?

Photo: norfolkdistrict on Flickr (cc)

In this post, I will examine the ways blogs are monetized and the ethical and prudential questions that arise from various forms of paid content in blogs.

Should blogs be monetized at all?

Adopting the stance that one should not be compensated for anything in their blog is a coherent view. I would consider it a very purist view that considers blogging an essentially personal and spontaneous activity, a conversation untainted by monetary concerns.

However, I don’t think there are serious ethical objections to monetizing most blogs.

Basically, the argument is that accepting compensation for writing something you would write anyway cannot be wrong.

I would also offer further arguments that blog hosting costs money, and time is money as well, so accepting payment for certain things helps cover these costs and may actually improve the quality of the blog, as you are able to spend more time on the blog instead of other work.

This does not mean that accepting bribes or being paid to promote junk is right. Quite the contrary, it seems that a moral rule that states that accepting compensation for writing something you do not believe in in your blog is wrong is quite valid indeed. After all, a blog is a channel for your opinions, and bending whichever way money is waved destroys the essential characteristics that the blogosphere is built on: authenticity and personality.

A potential counter-argument could then proceed along the lines that accepting money for something makes you more prone to accept money for other things as well. However, in argumentation theory this is regarded as a fallacy, slippery slope. In short, unless the causal chain from the minor action to the major action can be established, a slippery slope argument has no value. In this case, there does not seem to be good basis for the argument, as there is a clear and obvious line to be drawn between opinions you hold and opinions you do not hold. There just is no chance to err on that subject.

Disclosure is required by law, and by Google

Before proceeding any further, I must point out that when money or goods change hands, disclosure of this fact is mandatory both in the US and the UK. It is mandatory to clearly declare products received for free for review, paid-for trips, and cash payments.

Furthermore, Google has adopted the controversial stance that any paid links should be of nofollow variety or lead to intermediate pages that are blocked from search engines. Google considers this marking disclosure for search engines, and may penalize the rankings of both the linking site and the site linked to if paid links are not nofollow links. The other search engines don’t really seem to care either way.

Ways to monetize a blog

This is not a complete guide to blog monetization. If you want to make serious money with your blog, make a business plan. Rather, my goal here is to identify the types of monetization so that I can begin considering their ethical aspects.

Here is the list of types of monetization I can think of:

• Selling your own products or services: subscriptions, consulting, speaking gigs, ebooks.
• Selling advertisement space in the blog or its feed: various advertisement services (context-sensitive, selectable), direct advertisement.
• Selling content: reviews, paid posts, paid-for guest posts, paid links.
• Affiliate marketing: affiliate links.

Selling your own products or services

Well, this is quite straightforward. It’s your site, you hawk your wares. As long as you don’t lie about them, you’re pretty much good to go.

It should be observed that the traditional view of the blogosphere considers pure sales pitches inappropriate, and as a prudential matter too much self-promotion runs the risk of alienating your audience.

Spin is not an ethical way to sell anywhere, anyway, but the blogosphere is particularly sensitive to self-promotion. However, it is good to keep in mind that no one is going to find your products unless you mention them somewhere: moderate self-promotion is useful.

Selling advertisement space

The internet users of today are quite used to seeing ads all around. Many people block most of them with browser plugins, the rest just generally ignore them altogether. In a way, it seems futile to discuss the ethics of blog ads, as ads are seen as part of the regular internet landscape anyway.

There are prudential concerns, such as the number of ads to use, as turning your blog into a confusing patchwork of ads and original content is a sure way to alienate most of your readers.

However, this patchwork viewpoint raises a rather important point: your original content and the ads are both presented to the reader as part of the same experience. Therefore, if we assume authenticity and personality as the key characteristics of a blog, is it right to advertise products that you do not endorse?

In light of this concern, ads that you select yourself seem to be a more ethical choice than utilizing an ad service that places random ads, even if context-sensitive, on your blog. When you select the advertisement yourself, you can authentically endorse the product and the advertisement can be part of the relevant experience of your blog, even though it has to, of course, be declared as an advertisement.

When you let an external service display random advertisements on your blog, you cannot genuinely endorse them, and as such they work against the core characteristics of what a blog is. This discrepancy can be settled only if you consider advertisements an external part of the blog and not really part of the same experience.

Selling content

There are many ways to sell actual content space on your blog, and the different ways to go about this have very different consequences.

Reviews. The general stance seems to be that it is fine to have received the reviewed product free of charge, but not fine to have received money on top.

I can only reiterate my earlier argument that accepting compensation for writing something you would write anyway cannot be wrong. Ethically, it makes no difference if you receive money for a review or not. In fact, if you get paid to do it, you may even be able to make a better review, as you can spend more time making it.

However, as you are legally obliged to disclose that you have been paid and people have no way to verify whether the payment has affected your judgment, it is often impractical to pay for a review beyond providing the product itself.

Paid posts and paid-for guest posts. The same considerations that apply to reviews apply here as well. Accepting compensation for writing something you would write anyway cannot be wrong, so paid posts are all good ethically as long as the opinions are your own.

However, if the purchaser wants to have a say in the content, the situation changes radically. This is not a tenable situation, because now the purchaser is, in effect, inserting direct advertisement that does not look like an advertisement. Even if we take the stance that anything goes in the advertisement areas of the blog, because people know what to expect, including pure ad content into the posts themselves is highly misleading even if the post is labeled as sponsored.

Paid-for guest posts are no better, they are pure advertisement in an area where the audience expects authentic content.

Here, again, we encounter the problem of proving that the posted opinions are completely your own. It is, nonetheless, important to distinguish that this is a prudential consideration, not an ethical one.

Justin Goldsborough and Stephanie Schwab have both discussed whether partnerships, rather than paid one-off posts, may help establish trust. However, as can be seen from the comments to their posts, the issue remains controversial.

Paid links. Once again, the same considerations apply, accepting compensation for writing something you would write anyway cannot be wrong.

However, I really don’t see a viable future for paid links that are properly disclosed and nofollowed. Why would anyone want to pay for them? Individual paid links in the middle of a blog post are rather unattractive to people, and if they are nofollow links, they are also useless for search engine purposes.

Undisclosed dofollow links, on the other hand, are definitely attractive as they are likely to be clicked by humans and will improve the search engine rankings of the target site. However, they are also obviously unethical because they are intentionally misleading.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing has spread like wildfire, it is all over the blogosphere.

Affiliate links seem to be well-tolerated by people, and they are commonly used whenever mentioning any products that can be bought from a store or manufacturer that has an affiliate program.

From an ethical point of view, affiliate links are fine as long as you do not mislead people in order to get them to purchase products through your affiliate link.

Implications for bloggers

What does all of the above mean for a blogger?

• Remember disclosure, and for goods too, not just money.
• If it is your opinion, you are in the clear ethically. Prudence is another matter, because it is not always possible to prove to others that you are being honest.
• Widely accepted practices include accepting free products for review, affiliate programs, clearly marked ads, and moderate promotion of your own products and services.
• Be careful with paid content. Perhaps long-term partnerships will become the norm, but so far paid content is quite controversial.

Implications for marketers

What does all of the above mean for a marketer working on blogger outreach?

• Remember to mention that disclosure is needed, and for goods too, not just money.
• Do not offer your own content for a blog post. You can offer it for an advertisement that is not published as a post.
• If you want to get a product reviewed, go ahead and offer it for free, no strings attached. Also offer materials, such as photos and specifications, but not a ready-written review or a sales pitch.
• Consider long-term partnerships. Keep in mind that they are still quite controversial.
• It can help to create a relationship first, and bring money to the table later on. A history of commenting on blog posts can also help achieve acceptance from the readers of the blog (or ruin it completely if you are too pushy).

Anything still missing?

Paid content in blogs is a large and hotly debated subject. What do you think about it, or some part of it? Are ad services A-ok even though they push ads to products you may not endorse into your blog? Is there a way to bridge the gap between ethical behavior and proving you are honest?

Photo: Images_of_Money on Flickr (cc)

What if the native language of your best subject-matter expert is not spoken in your main market areas? What if you are in charge of marketing in multiple countries, each with their own language?

I have previously explored this subject in my post Translating your blog, is there a good way to do it? In that post, I concluded that blogs are not ideal material for translation, and better results could be achieved by translating articles that are based on blog posts.

Now I want to explore this subject from a slightly different point of view. Even if translation does not work, what if your awesome expert happens to speak the language you want to blog in, say English, as a foreign language?

Blogging in a foreign language is obviously possible if you are fluent in it. Lots of people do it, including me, as English is not my native language. What I’m interested in is why you might want to blog in a foreign language that you are not fully fluent in and what practices can help.

Sub-fluent language skills are not a show stopper

Text written by a non-native speaker tends to be more dry than that of a native speaker. With a more limited vocabulary and a limited number of idioms at the author’s disposal, it is more difficult to rely on analogies and word plays.

However, subject-matter experts often have a good understanding of the jargon of their field of expertise and may also be familiar with foreign language publications in their field. In many cases, they are able to produce quite good text on their specific field in a foreign language even if they were completely lost if thrown in a grocery store where only that language was used.

Why blog using a foreign language?

The gist of the matter is that a blog is a conversation. When you want to have a conversation, say between your best subject-matter expert and your biggest customers, they need a common language. Sometimes the customers will be comfortable speaking a foreign language, but if you happen to speak a minority language yourself, it is quite likely that you will need to go the extra mile in order for the conversation to happen.

Having a common language is also beneficial in multi-national companies to facilitate common culture and best practices.

Finally, blogging in a foreign language can also be beneficial for the blogger personally, because it improves the blogger’s language skills.

What risks are there?

The main risk is that the blogger’s message is twisted into something other than intended, possibly even something harmful. In addition to just spelling and grammar, there are many false friends and differing idioms that can lead to twisted messages.

What practices can help blogging in a foreign language?

Have your blog proofread. I realize that there are many people who may cry out that this reduces the authenticity of the blog, but I don’t think it does.

However, there are many ways to do proofreading, and some of them are better suited for blogs than others:

• Have your blog proofread with minimal editing. I do value authenticity, so while proofreading is important in order to ensure that you say what you intend to say, it should still sound like you as much as possible.
• A fluent subject-matter expert is a better proofreader than a native speaker with no subject-matter expertise. The most devious errors are the ones where you spell everything just right, but the meaning is all wrong. Native speakers with no subject-matter expertise often miss these errors, but catching them is more important than getting all the punctuation just right. Someone who understands the field can bring any such issues to your attention. For this reason, an internal proofreader is often better than an external one.
• Have the proofreader explain the reasons behind the corrections to you. This increases costs, but it is also the way to learn. Your proofreader should make himself unnecessary over time as your language skills improve.

Have any experiences to share?

Have you ever blogged or considered blogging in a foreign language? How did it work out for you?

Picture: LivingOS at Flickr (cc)

So, how is social media doing in this field in Finland? Not very well, I’m afraid. Let’s examine the results in more detail.

The survey was ordered by various industrial organizations and companies, and it was carried out by consultant Harri Lakkala from the social business design company Intosome.

I will present the findings that I consider most important in this post. Unfortunately, the survey (click on “Raportti” near the bottom of the linked page for the full PDF) itself is only available in Finnish. The survey report also includes recommendations on best practices and suggestions for future projects, but I do not provide information on them here.

General information on the survey

The survey consisted of two parts: an online questionnaire, which was answered by executives from 143 companies, as well as 12 in-depth interviews. The questionnaire had been sent to 2488 people, so around 6% of the recipients responded.

87% of respondents were strictly B2B companies, and 81% of respondents were from the manufacturing industry.

Most of the companies were small- or medium-sized, see the chart below.

Results of the questionnaire

Social media is only rarely used in the manufacturing industry in Finland. The three charts below detail the use of various social media tools with customers, internally at companies, and with partners.

Social networking sites are the most popular tools for use with customers, with 36% of companies using them at least somewhat. Video sharing (20%), discussion forums (18%), and wikis (12%) are also somewhat used.

For internal use, social networking sites still lead the pack at 32%. Wikis are close here, as 31% of companies use internal wikis.

Social networking sites are also the most used type of social media with partners at 29%. There is also some use of discussion forums (13%) and video sharing (12%).

The three charts below detail the purposes social media is used for with customers, internally at companies, and with partners.

Marketing is the most common purpose social media is used for with customers at 42%. The next ones are communications (41%) and employer branding and recruitment (39%).

Internally, social media is used quite steadily at around 25% for most purposes. It is used a bit more often for communications and collaboration, at 34% and 35%.

Social media is utilized significantly less with partners. Communication and collaboration takes the lead at 28%, but most other purposes are used much more rarely.

Other miscellaneous results from the survey:

• 18% of companies forbid all use of social media, 9% of respondents consider it a complete waste of time.
• 20% of companies have a social media strategy for internal use, 15% of companies have a social media strategy for external use, and 12% of companies have a social media strategy for use with partners.
• 32% of companies have social media guidelines.
• 12% of companies measure their social media efforts.
• 50% of companies monitor social media, 28% of companies have a tool for this.
• Approximately one third of the companies see no potential applications for social media. Around 25% of companies can identify at least one area where social media has major potential. The rest see some potential uses.
• More than half of the companies (55-60%) say that they understand social media poorly or not at all.

Case studies from the interviews

Reifer Oy – quality manual in a wiki. Reifer Oy is a contract manufacturer that employs approximately 30 people. Their quality manual is on an open-source wiki platform that includes a plugin for approvals, as the management approves all changes to the manual. The quality manual includes work instructions with text and photos, and there is a link between their ERP system and the wiki so that each order is accompanied by a link to the work instructions in the wiki.

Hydro Aluminium Salko – collaborative tools for partner network. Hydro Aluminium Salko is a contract manufacturer that employs approximately 50 people. They had formed a collaborative network with their customers and other companies in the supply chain that gathered monthly to analyze problems and agree on improvements. At the time of the interview, they had just taken into use a social media platform to further improve the collaboration between all members of the supply chain.

Rautaruukki Oyj – utilizing social media externally. Rautaruukki manufactures and supplies metal-based components and systems to the construction and engineering industries and employs more than 11,000 people. After launching internal blogs, wikis, and team pages, they started to utilize social media externally as well: product videos on YouTube, Facebook pages, participation in conversations on LinkedIn, and participation on Twitter.

Rautaruukki has social media guidelines and measures its social media efforts with indicators that include the number of readers and followers. Their goals include increased traffic on their website, new customers, and customer feedback. They also utilize social media for marketing, PR, and recruitment.

According to Rautaruukki, the major challenges with social media are resources and integration with other operations. Even though the tools are free, it takes time and thinking to use them. Companies need to stay true to their culture on social media, experiment fast and often, and accept that social media cannot be controlled.

Cargotec and Atostek – agile software development and online tools. Cargotec makes cargo-handling machinery and employs more than 9000 people, of whom 10 in software development. Atostek is one of its software development subcontractors and employs approximately 30 people. The process model is agile, and the utilized systems include project management, task management, and version management tools as well as wikis. These have significantly reduced phone calls and emails, and get the job done more effectively. The modern atmosphere has also proved to be an advantage when recruiting new employees, who enjoy such environment.

My thoughts on the survey results

The previous chapters merely present the results in a hopefully objective manner. Now I will begin discussing those results.

Methodology evaluation

The first thing to do when reading a survey is to evaluate the methodology.

In this case, the questionnaire was sent to a significant number of companies in similar fields, so the results cannot be generalized to other fields, but for B2B manufacturing industry companies in Finland, the target group was well representative.

The response rate was very low, but as research has indicated that response rates do not matter all that much, this is of no significance.

The number of responses, however, does matter. With 143 analyzed responses, the margin of error at 95% confidence level for 50% reported percentage is around 8%. For extreme figures, such as many of the figures in this survey, this drops to around 3%.

In other words, when the results say that 50% of companies that responded monitor social media, we can be 95% sure that the actual figure for all companies with these characteristics is between 42% and 58%. And when the results say that 8% of companies have external blogs, we can be 95% sure that the actual figure is between 5% and 11%.

All the figures in the survey are so extreme that the margin of error does not affect their interpretation.

The results include only information on the use of various social media tools and social media for various purposes. No overall figures of social media use are provided, i.e. it is impossible to say what percentage of companies utilize social media overall, because the users of different subcategories overlap and the extent of this is not reported.

It is also difficult to combine the data on tool use and the purposes social media is used for. For example, the percentage of companies that use social media for marketing (42%) is higher than the use percentage of the most popular social media tool, social networking sites (36%).

The most popular category of tools, social networking sites, is not further divided into actual services. Therefore, this survey provides no data on whether Finnish companies are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or some other service.

The alarming lack of blogs

One of the results I’m most concerned about is the lack of blogs. Only 8% of these companies have an external blog, compared to 23% of Fortune 500 and 50% of Inc 500. A McKinsey survey referred to in the survey report has found that 38% of its respondents had blogs. Add in Hubspot research that suggests that company blogs are second only to LinkedIn in B2B customer acquisition, and one has to wonder why this media is not utilized more.

It is also strange that 21% of the companies use social media to build thought leadership, yet most of them do so without a blog, which is usually the tool for thought leadership marketing.

Video sharing gaining ground

20% of these companies utilize video sharing in their interactions with customers. This seems to be the most popular, and successful, type of social content in the manufacturing industry, as video sharing also appeared most prominently in social media use in recent manufacturing industry trade shows.

Wikis: used internally, but why not with partners?

31% of these companies utilize internal wikis, but for some reason only 6% use wikis with their partners. This is a rather surprising result, as wikis are spectacular collaboration platforms. Then again, all other social media tools are also utilized only a little with partners, so it seems that adoption of this technology has not yet spread to partner networks.

Then again, 28% use social media as a collaboration platform with partners. Because the tool use is spread at much lower figures, this collaboration has to take many forms. Finding and sharing the discovered best practices should be especially useful in this case.

No faith in customer acquisition or value co-creation

Only 16% of these companies use social media for lead-generation. The only thing social media is used less for is R&D (11%). Perhaps these companies are not big believers in value co-creation?

Ruling out these important areas also diminishes the potential gains from social media: sales and R&D are central operations, and social media can directly contribute to both.

What is some use and what is active use?

Another thing to be noted is that the figures for “active use” were really low throughout. As “some use” may mean a lot of things, including quite little use indeed, the traditional industrial companies in Finland are still far, far away from effective utilization of social media.

Any other thoughts?

What ideas do you get from these results? Do you know of other similar surveys in other countries? For example, the Forrester studies presented in Groundswell show large differences in social media use between different countries, so it would be interesting to compare a number of countries and the use patterns there. Unfortunately, given these results, I’m afraid that Finland is not close to leading the tide on social media.

Photo: Pöllö (cc)

I have previously written about the importance of promoting your trade show presence online in order to maximize the gains from your investment. Manufacturing industry is highly conservative, so it is interesting to examine whether any online promotion practices are utilized in this field.

EMO Hannover 2011

EMO is the leading international trade show for the machine tool industry. In 2011, the trade show was held in Hannover, Germany on 16-21 September, and it gathered more than 140,000 visitors and more than 2000 exhibitors.

EMO 2011 organizer presence in online and social media

The organizer of EMO Hannover, VDW (German Machine Tool Builders’ Association), had increased its presence online, but there were still significant gaps in the online coverage of the event. Let’s examine their efforts in detail.

EMO website. The website was comprehensive, partially localized into multiple languages, and it was also updated during the event with daily videos (one per day), and PDF versions of the daily trade show newspaper (unfortunately, not optimized for online at a whopping over 20 MB download per issue).

EMO mobile app. All exhibitors and more on your mobile phone! EMO had built a mobile-optimized site that provided access to exhibitor information, bus schedules etc. and was accessible via WLAN for free. They also had an iPhone app, which had been downloaded 3200 times by the second day of the event. However, their mobile strategy had one fatal flaw..

Trade show WLAN at 10 EUR per hour. Well, this is obviously fatal to the online presence of an international event. Perhaps it is because of lack of bandwidth to serve the huge audience, but this pricing effectively prevents the use of social media for many visitors.

EMO on social networking sites. EMO featured a good set of presence on social networking sites: Facebook page (931 likes, content in German only), LinkedIn group (140 members, content is members only), Youtube channel (practically abandoned during the event, features only an introductory video), and two Twitter accounts, one in German and one in English (both were strictly broadcasting channels).

Overall, the organizers of EMO clearly knew where they should be. Unfortunately, it does not look like they knew how.

There were some things EMO did quite well:

• The EMO mobile app was the highlight of their online presence.
• Separate Twitter accounts for news in German and English.

Unfortunately, a number of other things went wrong:

• No free WLAN except for the EMO mobile site.
• Daily videos that only appeared on their own site, while their Youtube channel was abandoned even though it was linked to from their site.
• Daily newspapers were not optimized for web.
• LinkedIn group was not open, and thus not visible for most of the world.
• Facebook content in German only.
• No human voice anywhere: all avatars were logos, no interaction on any of the sites.

Compared to previous years, the organizers of EMO had put in a lot more effort on their social media presence. With the exception of the mobile app, these were fumbling steps, but ones that I hope will be studied and learned from.

The shortcomings could be fixed with mostly minor effort, except perhaps for the lack of free WLAN, which is the most important issue. For the rest, more openness, more interaction, and more human touch could work wonders.

EMO 2011 exhibitor and other participant presence in online and social media

What about the exhibitors? Lack of free WLAN is obviously a huge hindrance, but from a group of over 2000 companies, one would expect to see some clever use of social media nonetheless.

EMO 2011 featured prominently on exhibitor news pages and other static web pages. Manufacturing industry is definitely on the internet, if not on social media, as there were loads of announcements from companies that they were going to attend EMO. It’s impossible to tell if every exhibitor posted at least a news article about EMO, but it sure looks to be close.

There was hardly any live content or content posted during the event. Perhaps the lack of free WLAN killed this. The official hashtag for the event, #EMO2011, was used by less than 200 people, almost all of them corporate accounts with logos for avatars, and most of the content was simply advertising.

Highlights of online and social media use from EMO 2011:

• Kennametal. The definite #1 of Twitter interaction in the manufacturing industry, Kennametal tweeted, interacted, used their Facebook page, and ran a daily photography contest. Still, they were not quite on the same level as they were at imX, perhaps because of EMO being so far from their home.
• Sandvik Coromant. With daily videos on Youtube, tweets, Facebook page, and a QR code treasure hunt at their stand, Sandvik Coromant was quite visible online during the event.
• IMTSTV. The video crew of the major US manufacturing trade show, IMTS, visited Germany and created an hour long video each day. This was definitely the most professional effort to broadcast EMO, even though they also spent a fair bit of time advertising IMTS, which is held on alternate years with EMO. Unfortunately, I don’t have their viewer statistics: the Youtube versions were uploaded only after the event.
• Renishaw. QR codes for many of their product brochures at their stand. I do wonder whether the lack of free WLAN hurt their efforts.

imX Las Vegas 2011

Unlike EMO, imX was an invite-only event, and thus significantly smaller with around 5000 visitors. It was held in Las Vegas on 12-14 September. However, judging by its online presence, you’d never know it was smaller than EMO.

imX organizer presence in online and social media

imX website. The website was available in English only, but then again, the event itself was for companies operating in the United States. Like EMO, imX also featured a daily trade show newspaper, but the imX newspaper was an online epaper, which was, of course, much easier to read on the internet.

imX on social networking sites. imX featured a similar set of social networking sites as EMO, but the actual use of those sites was significantly different. They too had a closed LinkedIn group (which I’m not a fan of, but in this case it might be argued that it was because the event was invite only, and the group states to provide further details on the event program), and a mostly abandoned Youtube channel, but they also had very active Facebook page and Twitter account, both of which were used to promote the event in advance, share news appearances, and interact with followers.

imX got a bunch of things right:

• Promote early, promote often. They put their Facebook and Twitter accounts into good use before, during, and after the event.
• Live content from the show! For example, Peter Schutz’s and Jim Carroll’s keynote speeches were live tweeted on the imX account.
• Daily epaper newsletter.

There were nonetheless some things that could have been improved on:

• The Youtube account was not used very much: a few videos early on when the event was announced followed by just two more videos before the event and nothing from the event itself.
• There was a blog on the imX website, but it was used only before the event, not during the event or after it.
• No human touch. All imX accounts were impersonal logo accounts, even though the accounts were used for interacting with people. I have no idea who sent which tweets or posts.
• No free WLAN at the trade show area. I could actually only find one tweet about this, so I’m not fully sure. If this is true, it is a problem, although less severe than at EMO because the audience was not as international.

It seems that the imX online presence was spread a bit too thin: they did a good job on Facebook and Twitter, but not so well on Youtube and their blog. I’m not sure which is the lesson learned here: should the number of channels be reduced, or should there be more effort on providing in-depth view of the event through blogging and videos.

imX also utilized a little bribery by drawing an iPad among the people who tweeted about manufacturing and used their hashtag, #imxevent, or posted on their wall on Facebook. I’m not sure if that did the trick, but the level of engagement was definitely higher than for EMO.

imX exhibitor and other participant presence in online and social media

The exhibitor with by far the most visibility on social media was Kennametal. The definite #1 of Twitter interaction in the manufacturing industry, Kennametal tweeted and interacted from multiple accounts, including personal ones, used their Facebook page, and livestreamed their learning labs events during the show.

None of the other exhibitors really left their mark in the social space. I did notice that Okuma, for example, released PDF files of their presentations afterwards, but there was no notable action online during the event itself.

Conclusions: state of social media use in the manufacturing industry

Manufacturing industry is still in very early stages of social media use: a couple of forerunners are experimenting with state-of-the-art solutions, but for the most part social media is not widely utilized, at least externally. It is difficult to assess whether blogs, wikis, or collaboration tools are being used internally at companies.

On the other hand, there are clear signs that social media is up and coming to this field as well: many companies have a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, even if they don’t quite know what to do there yet. They just know that they should be there.

On blogging front, the IMTS trade show, for example, has a blog, and MMS Online recently started to recommend blogging for machine shops.

Video sharing, Youtube in particular, seems to be one of the most active outlets in the manufacturing industry. Perhaps this is to be expected: it is much easier to showcase machinery with videos than with text, and unlike with software, you can’t really give out demos of a machining center.

For a social media enthusiast, the actual use observed in EMO and imX is a little disappointing, but it looks like the social tide is seeping into manufacturing industry as well.

What about you? Do you have any good examples of social media use in the manufacturing industry, from these two trade shows or elsewhere? Or any further information on how successful the efforts of the forerunners have been?

Photo: UK department for business, innovation, and skills (cc)