As a Bob Dylan fan, this subject line on a recent e-mail from product manager Jane van der Spuy immediately caught my attention. Ditto the content, an extension to the SA Instrumentation and Control market offering and the subject of my editorial comment this month.
An opinion on songfacts.com suggests that Dylan wrote his song to support the civil rights movement that swelled in America during the early 1960s. Our product manager wrote her e-mail to support the start of the System Integrator marketing initiative we plan to swell in this publication during 2010.
Choosing your system integrator – the table we publish every month, has been running in its current guise since August 1998. Whilst we feel there is obvious value in being one of the table’s ‘Who’s Who’ in this competitive industry, we believe it is time now to expand the offering and not lag behind changing market trends and new ideas about business to business publishing. Recent research conducted on our behalf indicates that credibility is built, knowledge imparted and readers converted to clients when they have a source of credible editorial that shows them how, why, where and by whom a particular product or system was implemented successfully. I believe the key is to avoid hyperbole and explain in easily understandable terms why your product or service should be considered important by the particular segment of end users you desire to inform.
With readers and clients clamouring for instant information while vendors and system integrators grapple with the day-to-day business of tenders, projects and deadlines – and oh yes, Jane has asked us for some editorial – this important component of many an SI’s marketing plan understandably goes missing in action, mostly more often than not. In order to rectify this, we have designed a plan to generate market exposure for our SI’s through keeping our readers informed of the locally designed manufacturing solutions being implemented today in our industries.
The NEW System Integrator marketing package will include two A4 page editorials per annum. Written by one of our technical journalists, these will give readers an overview of the SI’s organisation and showcase the projects of choice to which it has made a significant contribution. The material will be gathered collaboratively from the SI and any other relevant parties and published in a new monthly feature titled System Integrators. The articles will also be uploaded to the SA I&C website where they will reside in a category, System Integration, and continue to be visible and generate interest in the future.
In addition, we will supply the PDFs in electronic format so that they can be used independently by the SI for marketing purposes outside SA Instrumentation and Control.
More about this next month once we have implementation under way. In the meantime, please contact Jane van der Spuy jane@technews.co.za or Tina van Kerckhoven tina@technews.co.za if you need more information.
2011 Buyers’ Guide – shelter from the storm
Some years ago I earned my living as a circuit designer in the employ of a company that specialised in the design and production of telecommunications equipment. While waiting for the components for prototyping to arrive, my colleagues and I worked under constant threat of an outburst from a managing director demanding to know: “I am spending a lot of money on R&D – why am I not seeing any activity for it?”
Alternatively it would be a frantic production manager: “I am in trouble if this bloody batch does not go out on time and the buyers cannot find any stock of that capacitor you specified!”
My fellow engineers and I learned to find the shelter we needed in the pages of our buyers’ guides.
The process of collating submissions for the 2011 edition of IBG is under way. Vendors do not forget, any advertising you do in here will stay on an engineer’s desk for a year and might save their bacon in a tight situation creating a customer for life. Readers, one day you may need shelter as we did. Make sure you get your copy.
Steven Meyer
Editor: SA Instrumentation & Control
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