Most marketing managers see social media as a very dangerous tool. Dealing with social media can give you very quick success or an even more rapid downfall. A well-planned marketing campaign can quickly turn into a marketing crisis, and in the eyes of many marketing managers, social media is therefore an acquired taste with unpredictable outcomes. But is it really unpredictable?

I personally don’t think social media is unpredictable, it is merely a paradigm shift. A while back, big corporations could sweep problems under the carpet and customers had little to no platform to voice their opinions on, and essentially, that is the part that marketing managers seem to be so afraid of: the customer’s opinion.

Attempting to sweep a problem under the carpet will usually create a marketing crisis when dealing with social media. This is called the Streisand effect and is named after Barbra Streisand, whose legal actions against images of her house sparked a wide interest in the images that otherwise would not have been there to begin with [1].

So far, I’ve to write few negative reviews but I usually have a few things listed in every product review that could be improved. Different manufacturers had different ways of responding. They ranged from “thanks for your feedback, we’ll fix it” to no response at all. The first response is great and most companies would have less problems dealing with social media if they’d save the sentence “thank you for your feedback, we’ll take care of that” as a boilerplate [2] somewhere and use it every time an issue comes up.

No reaction or no response is, in a way, the safe route but still undesirable. Companies should take feedback in social media (and anywhere else, for that matter) very serious and let the customer / reviewer know that they value their opinion.

Speaking of no response, Agilent has been contacted by me on at least 4 occasions. Every time I requested a demo device, the response time was usually less than 24 hours. They’d ask me what exactly I was planning on doing, and being fair, I would tell them that I have a blog and I’d like to review their products. And that was the end of it. Not once did I receive an answer after I explained my intentions. I mean of course, they want to sell something. And of course, my request is probably undesirable and of course, it’s their prerogative to not participate in such a review, but they could at least write a quick response saying that they are unable to participate or that they chose not to participate.

So if they already serve somebody, they know they will write about it on the web with the silent treatment, how will their customer service interact with other undesirable requests, maybe from paying customers? It’s not too difficult to imagine that the response is equally poor.

To be fair, I do understand that most sales managers are unfamiliar with social media and do not know what they can and can not do. And that brings me to Teledyne LeCroy. My first contact was not sure what he could and what he could not do, but he did the correct thing: he told me exactly that. Additionally, he clarified LeCroy’s position on this internally and got back with me. The rest is history to the frequent readers of my blog.

Teledyne LeCroy, Abracon and Jackson Labs are the top companies regarding response time, as well. Even though I am a non-paying customer and prospectful trouble maker, they respond very quickly at any time of the day whenever I have a question or an issue. And that’s exactly what people want to see. No product is flawless. No matter how hard the marketing guys try to bend the truth, perfection does not exist. And nobody understands this better than engineers, but engineers have little to no appreciation for poor customer support.

That was my rant of the day. I’ll make sure that Agilent gets a link to this article. Let’s see if we can break the silence.

Update (04/01/2013): I got one response from Agilent today in response of my most recent request of a demo license of Agilent’s RF design software Genesys.

Thanks for your patience. As this is more of a marketing request I needed to check in with our Genesys Product Manager and he has been on vacation. I apologize for the delay. Unfortunately I found out that Agilent does not provide software demo licenses to support blog reviews. That said, in the coming months we will be at some major RF/MW tradeshows (Wamicon, IMS/MTT) and Agilent would be happy to meet with you and provide a demonstration as well as answer any questions you have for a blog review.

Links and Sources:

[1] Streisand effect, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

[2] Boilerplate, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_(text)

In order to make this forum more professional, I invested into a new camera. I picked a Veho VCC-008. It’s not a top-notch product at all but it is more than sufficient for getting the job done for this blog. The camera has a 5 megapixel CMOS sensor and – important for the video blog – can record in full HD (1080p, 30 fps), as well as in 720p at 30 or 60 fps.

To give you a preview of the improved quality, here a few sample pictures. Note, though, that the resolution was reduced to 3 megapixel to make it easier to compare them with the old low-quality look. Also, they are mostly cropped and reduced in size (just like almost any picture on the blog).

Abracon ABPSM ultra low noise power supply

Abracon low-noise power supply and Sync n Go 10 MHz Stratum III reference

Abracon ABFT frequency translator / jitter attenuator evaluation board

Freescale TWR-KL25Z48M, tower board for the Kinetis L-series processor family (BOX)

Freescale TWR-KL25Z48M, tower board for the Kinetis L-series processor family (TOP)

Freescale TWR-KL25Z48M, tower board for the Kinetis L-series processor family (Bottom)

STM32 Discovery Board, top view

STM32 Discovery Board, bottom view

Engineering sample kit from the Components Corporation

My YouTube channel [1] is currently only used for auxiliary videos which are used for illustration purposes of this classic text blog. But that is supposed to change.

So why another video blog? While there are plenty of really good electronics video blogs out there, almost all of them completely neglect the world of high frequency signals. Dave Jones (EEVblog) [2] usually doesn’t cover RF-related stuff at all. Mike Harrison (Mike’s Electric Stuff) [3] and Jeri Ellsworth [4] do touch RF related topics occasionally but usually not very deeply. Mike actually called RF the art of voodoo in a recent teardown video.

The video blog is supposed to go hand in hand with this classic text blog you are reading right now. You will see product reviews and tutorials for basic and advanced RF and test equipment related topics. Since RF nowadays goes hand in hand with microcontroller applications, I will occasionally cover microcontroller-related topics as well.

The first videos will hopefully be up by early November. I currently have a nice line-up of manufacturer contributed items to review. I would love to hear what YOU would like to see on the video blog in particular and most importantly, if you can imagine watching an RF-oriented video blog, subscribe to my YouTube channel [1] now so that I can get a general overview of how many are actually interested.

Links and Sources:

[1] KF5OBS, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/KF5OBS

[2] EEVblog, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog

[3] Mike’s Electric Stuff, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff

[4] Jeri Ellsworth, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/jeriellsworth