|
 |
Wednesday, August 2, 2006 |
A big part of every Profibus Trade Organization annual meeting deals with marketing. PTO wants to help members market their [Profibus] products. Michelle Palmer, publisher of Control Engineering, was invited to discuss how to use magazines as part of a marketing program. She was in marketing before becoming a magazine publisher.
Her first topic dealt with dealing with editors. I couldn't write fast enough to get all her points, but she made lots of them about how marketers should approach press releases sent to magazines. The main points were to be direct, state the important facts early, be concise, use nouns, write a good headline. Also, send by email, not snail mail. She was right. We want product press releases, but we want something understandable without a lot of vague marketing hype.
She also pointed out that marketers need to know just who their target people are. If you really want to reach people, you need to match your message with your target person.
When planning your marketing message, know what action you want the reader to take from your communication. What do you want the reader to take away from your ad about your brand in 3 seconds?
"This is the kind of ad I like. Facts, facts, facts," Samuel Goldwyn.
For ad text, use details, solve a problem. After all, in this market most buyers are either working as engineers or even as managers they are trained as engineers. They dislike glitz, they want facts.
[Gary's comments] This was all good advice for marketers. I have some marketing experience (special machines and computer equipment) and learned from several really good marketing people. Since I've been involved with trade publishing, I've been appalled by the overall quality of advertising and PR I've seen. There are some really good ones in the industry, but there are so many poor ones. Some examples: Press releases that are all superlative adjectives with few nouns. Ads with no purpose or that never say what the company offers or offers a call to action. Then there are the people who say "I only have money for three ads this year, so let's do January, June and October." That's bad. Repetition is the key to success. If you can only do three, then bunch them with some PR and get some impact.
5:14:11 PM 
|
|
I'm blogging live from the Profibus Trade Organization annual meeting in Phoenix. Executive Director Mike Bryant showed numbers that reveal continuing growth for all types of Profi (bus, net, safe). One number that got my attention was the growth in installed Profisafe devices from 80,000 to 190,000 in the last year. That is a lot, and shows how interested users are in new safety technologies. There are 15,400,000 installed Profibus devices installed, now.
During some open discussion, it became apparent that much education remains both for users and for developers in both Ethernet and wireless. Since I'm working on the 2007 Automation World editorial plan, this is definitely something I'll consider.
One last statistic--there were in the last year 11 times more referrals to the Profibus Web site (I'm assuming the Profiblog site) from this blog than from all members combined.
Edgar Kuester who has many titles with Profibus International is now laying out technological development progress with the various Profi networks. There will be news for some time to come with this technology. One interesting point among many is the growth of Profinet (an Ethernet implementation) in process industries.
Bryant's enthusiasm and excitement peaked with a discussion of custom ASICs for the Profinet Ethernet implementation. Some competitors mention it as a "proprietary" chip. Actually, Siemens does make the chips, but it is more that willing to sell them to anyone developing Profinet products. At any rate, there are good engineering reasons for implementing things in silicon rather than software only. [Of course, there are counter arguments. That's what makes competition great. That's a Gary comment.]
One final caveat -- as Bryant surveyed the technology landscape and thoughts about the future, he stated that Profi is evolving from a fieldbus technology to an automation technology. That's perceptive (Mike, did you think that one up all by yourself?) and I agree. Think on that for a minute. There's a lot of meaning in that statement.
Edgar is still discussing new developments. Expect to see a lot of news from Profibus in the future.
2:48:59 PM
|
|
Here's a post from Steve Pazol at the M2M blog. I have sometimes gotten the idea that the M2M people were just cellular wireless fanatics--when I felt that cellular was sort of like a WAN to other technologies' LAN. Steve proves me wrong--about the fanatic part, anyway. He has an interesting analysis of ZigBee, too.
Wireless, schmireless. Wireless, schmireless (I thought this was almost original until I searched on google and came up with 289 hits of the phrase). Anyway, I often get quizzed on the difference or interrelationship in M2M between cellular wireless and ZigBee. To simplify it, I look at cellular as wide area wireless and ZigBee (along with Wifi, Bluetooth, other mesh technologies, etc.) as local area wireless as ways of connecting assets.
There is a lot of information available on ZigBee, but for a very brief primer, it is a wireless technology that is designed for three things: low power consumption, cheap and wireless (mesh). The promise that Zigbee holds is that it will become cost effective to network almost everything. In today's world, you have to run two wires to get a temperature off of a freezer, one for power to the sensor and the other to get the data back to some data gateway. With Zigbee-enabled sensors, the batteries take care of the power cable and the wireless transmission takes care of the other cables. This saves tremendous cost of physical wiring and installation - costs which often times are the most expensive part of a project.
Where do you get ZigBee? Well, that is part of the challenge. Since it is still an emerging technology and Zigbee is a new standard, off the shelf solutions are just starting to come to market. Someday (at least in theory) you'll be able to buy an off the shelf, Zigbee-enabled sensor, and hook it into one of several third party gateways to move the sensor data somewhere. Today, I don't know of much interoperability between vendors' offerings. Also, different companies are playing at different parts of the ecosystem, but almost all of them at the subsystem level. For example, Ember and Freescale are really chip companies, while Dust and Millenialnet are more of subsystem providers, who sell to systems integrators and OEMs. Although companies like Honeywell and others have announced partnerships, I don't have a lot of direct knowledge of products shipping from these OEMs.
Anyway, what does this have to do with Cellular? Quite a bit. It's great that you can get the information back to some local gateway, say at a store or local control system, but how do you get it back over a wide area to an enterprise? That's where cellular wireless and wired come in. If you are looking to move data from geographically dispersed assets (as opposed to locally dispersed), a highly scalable, infrastructureless way to do this is important. In many cases, it is very difficult to get a company to run a phone line or ethernet cable or DSL line to some location just so you can monitor things. Cellular lets you do this without having to depend on the local infrastructure.
I plan to cover this topic much more in the future, but to my mind, the two technologies are complementary, not competitive.
- Steve Pazol
9:16:00 AM
|
|
Yokogawa has joined the user conference group. It's Technology Innovation Fair and User's Conference will be in Houston November 29 - December 1.
Let's see, for an editor, that means leaving Tuesday Nov. 28, finding a place for the weekend in order to check in the site in Dallas for the Invensys Users Conference Dec. 4 - 7. See you all somewhere!
7:43:30 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2006 Gary Mintchell.
|
|
|
