SocialMFG Blog – Bringing Social Media to Manufacturing
A great resource for me as I was starting to investigate and implement our social media strategy was
Dianna Brodine, managing editor of
Peterson Publications. I have known Dianna through her work with the
Manufacturers Association of Plastics Processors (MAPP) organization and in particular their magazine,
Plastics Business. She authored a
feature article on Team 1 and edited a 2
nd article on our
activity based costing model.
She and I exchanged emails and phone calls earlier this year concerning the need for manufacturers to become more involved in social media. I believed that we had several years before it would really affect us but she convinced me that the time is now and potential customers are using social media to find new suppliers. She played a key role in our decision to start blogging and she also started a blog, SocialMFG that focuses on the manufacturing community and introducing them to some of the social media tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, etc.
We have both observed that most manufacturers are reluctant to become involved in social media and believe that since they have a website, usually one that has not been updated since its launch, then new customers will find them. As part of our efforts to educate the plastics manufacturing community we are going to be joint facilitators of a break out session devoted to social media at the upcoming MAPP annual benchmarking conference in Indianapolis on October 21, 2010.
