In thinking how the EDA industry can benefit from Social Media, one has to first of all understand the larger picture. Does Social Media have staying power? Is it descending to the depths of gossip, or is it ascending to the heights of professional discourse? Is it a fad or the beginning of a powerful reconfiguration of communication habits?

A short article that accompanied a readers' poll in one of Italy's most popular daily, La Stampa, caught my attention since it dealt with one aspect of the much heralded "Social Media" popularity. The popularity of things like Twitter and Facebook with a large crowd of users eager to communicate both with friends and with perfect strangers, has given hope to some people in Marketing that a new and more powerful communication mechanism has been born and needs to be used to its utmost.

The poll by La Stampa was taken as a follow up of an article in the New York Times by Virginia Heffernan, published on August 26, 2009. The poll asked only one question: Have you already grown tired of Facebook? There were 1607 respondents. Of these, 916 (57%) said yes, 438 (27%) said no, and 253 (15%) responded that they had never been a Facebook user.

At first blush the numbers seem small, but we must consider that readers of La Stampa are professionals who are mostly interested in politics and finance, and not teenagers ready to respond to the latest consumer gadget or clothing line gossip.

To a daily like La Stampa this poll is not just a journalistic curiosity. Many newspapers have started to promote news stories on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and the like, in the hope to attract readers to their websites. The purpose, of course, is to increase the advertising potential of the specific site, thus increasing revenue.

Jennifer Preston, social media editor of the New York Times states that the paper "must be where people consume content". The paper is following her direction with significant investments on both its Facebook and Twitter presence. The expectations are that by 2013 revenue generated by sales of advertisements referred to from social network sites will reach $3.5 billion for the entire publishing industry.

David Gelles, in a story published in the Financial Times on September 1, writes:
"But while news organisations and content providers are enabling sharing across multiple platforms, it is not yet clear how these 'engines of recommendation' are shaping what news is most read. Early indications suggest that while social media may be directing more eyeballs to news sites, it is upending traditional editorial agendas.
Instead of world and political news receiving the most attention, it can be anything from a health story to a profile of an athlete that spreads fastest, or 'goes viral'."

EDA and Social Media

In order to discuss how Twitter and Facebook (or web instruments similar to it) can be used by EDA publishers and marketing organizations of EDA vendors, one must understand how Twitter and Facebook work. In both cases, the fundamental requirement is to build a collection of "followers", that is people that will automatically see an entry by the author when they log on, or obviously if they are logged on (and remember to refresh the screen). An entry that is seen by the followers of the author, may be lost to anyone else. Thus the most important investment is to grow the number of followers. Once that is done, or if you are very skilled while that is being done, one must fine tune the profile of the followers. It does no good for an author to have a large following if no follow up activity occurs as a result of a posting.

But the two media are different. Twitter is a platform for announcements that is as powerful as the group of followers the user can gather. In order to be profitable an entry must cause the reader to jump to another site were the full information is available and where a decision will, either in the short or longer time, result in a positive effect for the author.

Facebook allows more latitude, not just of length of content, but also of the type of content. Yet whether the content is words, pictures, or video, the reader still has to be sent to another site where an action can be performed that will be of benefit to the author.

In both cases an EDA vendor will not benefit unless it either grows the number of potential buyers familiar with its products, or increases sales, or increases its reputation as a trusted solution provider. Small companies can achieve a greater benefit from the use of social network sites because they cannot justify the creation and management of a Users Group given the relative small number of customers. In this case, building a group of users with Facebook, or even Google Groups, can be beneficial and can lead to the eventual creation of a true Users Group on the company website.

Corporate Blogging: a Threat to Established Publishing

I consider blogging a part of Social Media. Blogging is replacing Viewpoint articles and white papers on established publications. Many companies have corporate bloggers whose job is both self-promotion and corporate-promotion. By its association with an author who has already established his or her stature in the industry, the company is increasing its reputation as an industry leader and a credible solutions provider. By publishing the blog on its own web site, the company is directing potential users to a virtual world that offers easy access to its products, its success stories, and its "environment".

This is a problem for established publication channels because as the number of Viewpoints and White Papers offered to them diminish, so do advertising revenue. Although the traditional way to enlarge the number of potential customers was to publish on a established publication site, that benefit can be replaced by a well coordinated activity on various social media sites, as well as independent sites covering the industry that offer editorial comment without the large overhead a traditional publishing site must maintain.