It’s great to see EE Times Group picking and making best use of great talent from around the world to produce the best possible editorial, and I hope that Ron will be able to provide a boost to exhibition side of Embedded Live in the UK, which has attracted a disappointing number of exhibitors to date.

European marketing professionals must ask, “Will a great EETImes.com mean I don’t need to do local marketing?” I certainly don’t think that this is the case. If we forget the hugely important factor of local language, I still believe that local websites will dominate the majority of online reading for engineers in Europe – at least for the time being. Habit, promotion through print publications and local content are all going to ensure strong traffic to local sites.

In the long term, however, I’m sure EE Times Group will try to grab more and more traffic from Europe, as well as the globe’s other continents. EE Times has the benefit of scale: the 21 topics within “Design” and 17 product categories is more than any European editorial team has been able to pull together (elektroniknet.de, for example, has 11 categories that span both design and products). Only time will tell whether the ability to produce highly specific content will be sufficient to attract European engineers’ eyeballs away from local sites.

1. Goal setting and measurement are important
2. Media measurement requires quantity and quality
3. AVEs are not the Value of Public Relations
- Do not measure the value of PR or future activity
- Where comparisons are made validated metrics should be used
- Multipliers should never be applied unless proven to exist
4. Social media can and should be measured
5. Measuring outcomes is preferred to measuring media results (outputs)
6. Organisational results and outcomes should be measured whenever possible
7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement

If you’re not heavily into PR, most of these ideas probably seem like basic common sense – set goals, define success in terms of the impact on the business/organisation, be transparent, etc. Whenever you get PR people to talk about measurement, you’ll also always have a furious attack on AVE, and those at Barcelona didn’t disappoint. Quite why AVE has to be picked out from the many different, flawed measurement approaches being used today, I’m never sure. Personally I’ve never seen AVE as inherently evil: it’s just a lazy, thoughtless and somewhat irrelevant measure. At least the declaration makes it clear that PR performs a different function from advertising – something I strongly agree with.

What does the declaration mean for marketing professionals in the electronics industry? Probably very little – it’s unlikely to affect anything you do tomorrow, even though the goal of achieving better measurement of PR campaign is something that agencies and clients would both love to achieve.

At Napier we work on many payment-by-results (PBR) projects. I appreciate that many other agencies don’t “approve” of PBR, but there is one reason we love it. When money is at stake, clients give us very clear, specific and measurable goals. We don’t get asked to “issue x releases per year”, we get told “I must get coverage in publication y” or “product z must be described in the trade press as the fastest/biggest/smallest”. I know that PBR isn’t for everyone (some of our clients choose not to use it), but perhaps if everyone imagines that the fee level depends upon hitting the metrics, we will all define better and clearer measurement for our campaigns.

With the availability of tools that mean anyone can self-publish a magazine, perhaps the media companies offer something that is really valuable – [relatively] independent journalists. When coupled with the publishers database that let them reach huge number of potential readers, this gives publishers a real opportunity to generate significant business from custom publishing.

Although custom publishing can be an excellent marketing vehicle, with ARM possibly offering the best example of a company that depends upon a vibrant ecosystem for its success, I do wonder whether it’s all good news.

Marketers have no problems making sweeping statements, such as “print is dead”, despite new launches providing clear contrary evidence. Personally I think that the marketing industry is increasingly looking for the “magic silver bullet” that will achieve great ROI and clear measurement, whilst requiring minimum effort. Perhaps some of the enthusiasm for custom publishing is a result of people searching for the “one big thing” that will really make a difference?

It will be interesting to see whether custom publishing does grow in our industry. I definitely do believe that there is a place for it – the ARM special is clearly a great move for vendor, partners and publishers. However, I hope marketing managers don’t lose sight of the importance of frequency and simple hard work that will generate the most sustained returns in the long term.

Th publication will launch in November with issues available at electronica 2010 and ComPaMED (17 to 19:11:10, Düsseldorf). In 2011 six issues will be published in German, and we’re promised an English language version by the end of 2011.

I’m always pleased to see new publications launch, and perhaps this is an indication of what might happen to magazines in the future: we may see fewer electronics titles, but I think it’s likely that there will be more vertical publications that include electronic design in their remit. With distribution costs falling as digital magazines are finally a competitive option, we may see the launch of many more vertical titles.

• Two thirds of FTSE 100 companies have an official Twitter account, but only 40 per cent use this channel actively (the others just  registered an account, branded their Twitter page and linked it back to the corporate website)
• At least 42 FTSE 100 companies have had their company names hijacked on YouTube, yet only 43 have their own YouTube channel
• One in five FTSE 100 companies have an external blog
• 90 FTSE 100 companies that have a presence on Facebook, partly as a direct result of Facebook pulling in Wikipedia descriptions of most of the FTSE 100. In practice only one quarter of FTSE 100 companies have a coordinated and coherent Facebook strategy

Given that many of the largest companies in the UK are marketing to consumers, the stats surprise me. Although I believe that social media will always be more important in a consumer environment, clearly many companies don’t believe it’s worth the (pretty minimal) effort. Perhaps the biggest issue for consumer companies is the hijacking of brands – for example @BPGlobalPR – and whilst this will drive more activity in the consumer space, we’ve yet to see much of a problem with hijacking for B2B companies.

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Generating such a high number of downloads must mean there is a demand for more media-driven apps on mobile devices, and I’m sure that the Electronics News app helps drive traffic to the site. I’m also told that the app has recently been improved with feature to automatically populate the user’s details when they make an enquiry. I’m sure that in the future we’ll see many different publishers’ apps in the iTunes store.

For example you can compare the volume of searches for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit, which shows 8-bit interest beginning to fall off at the start of 2005, whilst searches for 32 bit are increasing. Perhaps you could also say that the fall in the graph for 16-bit supports the view of some analysts that many 8-bit users will chose to move directly to 32-bit, skipping 16-bit platforms.

Another example – probably best suited to people with no English heritage or those used to losing [I support Ipswich!] – is an analysis of the search terms England football and Fabio Capello. “England Football” peaks every two years (for the World Cup and European Championships), apart from 2008 [football fans will know why]. I’d suspect that the recent surge of interest in Mr. Capello is probably one of the exceptions to the “no publicity is bad publicity” rule!