SCHAD has developed EXTEND7000, a unique mobile application for remote monitoring, control and maintenance of automated industrial systems like fully automated warehouses, high speed baggage handling lines in airports, automated production lines controlled by PLCs and SCADA systems.

It’s a slightly incongruous mix to think state of the art German, automated engineering precision crossed with funky mobile app but it’s proving its worth across industry. SCHAD are exhibiting at the BlackBerry Innovation Forum tomorrow at ExCel where they’ve previously won a string of awards.

Using an ordinary smartphone or tablet, highly skilled engineers can monitor PLCs and SCADA systems and get remote access to control operations in the event of problems. With the addition of cameras, they also have the ability to view the plant controls remotely and shut down functions if needed, pending a fix.

By using EXTEND7000, multiple automated systems can be controlled using a single interface from any location, giving engineering staff a 100% remote control room in their pockets which avoids the need to manage costly fixed control rooms. The system works using existing Wi-fi and GRPS infrastructure providing a very low cost monitoring system.

FAQ – WHAT IS EXTEND7000?

Proof is in the pudding

ROI figures from existing customers have shown the system significantly reduces costs through up to 60% lower downtime, faster throughput levels and better resource utilisation. SCHAD has users across industry in transport and logistics, transportation services/operations (airports), manufacturing – food and beverage, automotive.

EXTEND7000 has been identified as a hot technology and SCHAD received $4m in VC investment earlier this year – see earlier article in TechCrunch. They are also previous BlackBerry, Vodafone and Financial Times innovation award winners.

Examples of benefits seen:

1. Munich Airport – Estimations by the baggage handling operation at Munich Airport have shown that, as a result of using SCHAD’s technology, system downtime has dropped significantly and they can service an extra 12 aircraft a day.

2. Lugato – manufacturing and distribution of industrial products – reduced system downtime by 30 minutes each day which allows them to ship an extra truckload of finished goods daily.

Other users: Koln Bonn airport, Berlin airport, LSG Sky Chefs (Lufthansa).

If you are going along to the BB Innovation Forum tomorrow, drop by their booth tomorrow and speak to James Hannay. He can give you a live demo showing how the system works in real time. And there will be lots more from me on SCHAD and what they’re up to very shortly.

Find me on Twitter @mundoprlesleym or email lesleyATgood-prDOTcoDOTuk

Understanding what makes the CFO tick is therefore essential for successful marketing communications and achieving subsequent sales.  Messaging needs to be even more business benefit orientated and directly demonstrate how the business’ long term goals can be achieved.

Getting the communications balance right presents both an opportunity and threat to potential technology suppliers.  Overall, in 75% of organisations, the CFO plays a vital role in determining IT investment

One thing PRs will be familiar with is boundary spanning and the need to represent the interests of multiple stakeholders when communicating.  IT providers now need to adopt a similar approach and getting CFOs on side is easier if, as a supplier, you are able to play a ‘boundary spanning’ role, negotiating the needs of both IT and finance as primary key stakeholders.

Befriending the CFO – key do’s and don’ts for IT providers to remember

It is essential to win the endorsement of the CFO for a particular technology solution and understanding how to reach this individual and communicate in a meaningful way is critical for sales success.

When asked the question: Is it OK for journalists/bloggers to name and shame persistent PR professionals, 55% said no.  I am surprised about that because we should know and learn from our mistakes.  On the one hand I believe in solidarity for one’s profession – PR gets enough ribbing for being vague and ‘fluffy’.  However, how many times have we seen ranting tweets from journalists fed up of a barrage of un-targeted communications or annoyed by being asked whether they would be ‘printing the press release’.

Only last week I had a conversation with an editor who previously used to send out synopses of upcoming articles to selected PR contacts he knew well.  He told me he had to stop the practice ‘because of a couple of pesky PRs who would bombard his freelancers with irrelevant information’.  Shame, those updates were really useful….their poor practice spoiled it for the rest of us.

PROs who alienate the influencers that are so important to client communications should a) know who they are, b) know that we know who they are, and c) try to do something about improving their ways for the future.

Let’s all learn the difference between professional tenacity and blind persistence.

So what could you write your blogs about?

1. Comment on something in your industry sector – a new event, conference, forthcoming product launch, event you have attended
2. Offer free advice which has an intrinsic value to readers looking for initial guidance on a topic
3. Discuss new market research or a white paper recently published
4. Offer a perspective on a trade press article – akin to a letter to the editor, make sure you give full credit to those who inspired you and any other sources.
5. Share interesting content – favourite user case studies (preferably without promoting the competition), editorial leaders, videos or podcasts
6. Expand an article written by another blogger, offer an alternative viewpoint
7. Interview an industry figure and publish it as a Q&A
8. Ask some industry colleagues, clients, associates to write a ‘guest blog’ for you.  As well as providing varied content, this has other link building/community building benefit
9. Above all make time to gather inspiration.  It’s too easy to get swept away by the ‘busyness’ of the day and not flick through magazines, read your Linked In Group updates etc.   That’s all useful idea generating fodder….

And if after trying all these ideas you still don’t have the time to blog, it might be time to call in the professionals!

If you have any other suggestions for writing a decent blog, to help me make the list a round 10, I’ll be delighted to hear them, please get in touch.

Maybe that’s a bit too far for now, but lessons in social media are all the rage…..

I have myself conducted a Twitter class of this type for one client to teach them the basics of what it was and how to use it.  It was an interesting experience because it brought to light that the biggest issue concerning the use of social media, which is also touched upon by both Scott and the other article’s authors.

Learning how to use Twitter is the easy bit, but the thing that many companies fail to understand is ‘why they should be/are using it’. What’s their end goal?

Yes it is a fantastic broadcasting medium for reaching new audiences but that falls well short of Twitter’s potential. It’s also excellent for research and customer service and for giving a brand a clear personality etc etc as many have already documented in other articles.  Most clients however fail to establish a clear objective for their use of Twitter beyond the ‘we are just doing it to keep up with the Joneses’ strategy.  I guess it is better than the alternative ‘not keeping up with the Joneses’ but somehow they are missing a fantastic engagement and data mining opportunity along the way.

The fact that Twitter (and any other social media) is time consuming means it is often relegated to become a job for the PR agency and overlooked by the key people within the business.  In my book that’s a big mistake.  I believe the most beneficial way smaller businesses in particular, who often lack the resources to dedicate to social media can benefit from using Twitter, is to work in partnership with their PR team and share the workload, with each having clear objectives in mind for their own individual contributions.

Finally returning to the topic of classes, I myself have recently invested in a Linked In class which I found very useful indeed.  Thank you emarketeers!  I now have all my friends asking me to pop round and give them tips on personal SEO etc over a glass of wine.

Watch out for more articles discussing my thoughts on Linked In shortly…..

He is skeptical about Twitter and his sentiments completely echoed my own previous doubts about the medium.  I am by no means an expert but have learned a lot about its benefits in recent months.  Yes it can be a time waster and yes there is loads of drivel.  I almost never follow celebrities and am very choosy about anyone else.  But it’s also incredibly useful for keeping on top of information and current affairs events like the Budget.  The search is powerful and when combined with a dashboard application it’s very handy for keeping tabs on the influencers you need to monitor for clients.  Not to mention that it’s a de facto requirement for effective SEO activity.

I like to think of Twitter as a more convenient and user friendly Google Reader.  RSS feeds are great but they are not push in the same way that Twitter is.  And they are not so easily searched and expanded upon.  They require more effort. And most non techy people haven’t really got to grips with them.  I’ve been asking around and don’t know anyone who uses RSS but they all use Twitter for keeping abreast of things. Arguably the only people who use them do so for SEO purposes rather than consumers actually accessing news.

In the middle of the afternoon, when you need a little diversion, Twitter is also brilliant fun.  My personal recent favourites in the #middleclassfilms and #workingclassfilms discussions were ‘Aldi Kings Men’ and Lidl Women’. Brilliant!

So it’s not as cut and dried to say Twitter is a waste of time.  There are Twerps everywhere and I guess the beauty of Twitter is that in this medium, they only have 140 characters of airtime before they vanish.

Google and the other search engines like it, human visitors love it, and let’s face it, we enjoy the challenge of making them too!  YouTube is the second most visited site on the web after Google….we know those statistics….

Lately I’ve been working on a number of videos for different clients.  They have been very varied both in purpose – from employee engagement to sales tools – and content – SGEF’s accountants playing rugby and the inner workings of Faber Music’s warehouse.

Each one has posed different challenges and required a new approach but common to each is the unique power video has to deliver a message and achieve the desired ‘out-take’.

Building in a strong call to action on a sales oriented video used to be about including a live URL at the end to pull the audence straight into a landing page.  That’s still important but now, such is the pulling power of video, that greater interactivity is possible with clickable tags.  Last week VMIX (UK) announced they are offering this with wireWAX, and their Clairol video illustrates how this can work in practice.

It’s a sign of how even more powerful video will become in the future as clickable “tags” can be added to moving people or objects in online video, creating a dynamic viewing experience and ultra strong calls to action.  So in the future when you’re viewing an online video, you can click a tag and built in-video pop-ups will reveal related images, other videos, web pages, social media profiles, even online storefronts, without leaving the page or video.

How uber cool is that!!!

Using Cover It Live software, a team of experts and business people gave their immediate reactions to George Osborne’s speech.  It wasn’t polished or scripted – unlike GO’s – but honest and engaging for the audience.

At the same time, we were tweeting as a team about what was going on in Parliament and doing a bit of an experiment with a ‘Twitterview’.  That was an eye-opener to see the extent of Twitter activity – bit like a group of campaigners at Speaker’s Corner shouting out snippets of the news as they heard it…a mad land grab for attention. And then there was the battle of the hashtags with #budget2011, #ukbudget and #budget11 all out there.  What this has taught me is that events on Twitter are great but to engage people with something as big as the Budget is best left until afterwards.  So we’re going to be taking a topic at a time and having a much more targeted ad focused discussion using social media channels.  All this stuff is very new so it’s a learning curve for us all.

And people are still tweeting about the changes introduced….petrol will drop tonight and yes, if you give 10% if your estate to charity you get a 10% inheritance tax reduction….but when you do the figures it actually only equates to a 4% drop.  So giving away 10% to get  4% discount doesn’t quite add up…but hey, I’m just a PR consultant….

1. Networking and schmoozing.  My business partner Heather Kidd is a fantastic networker and always makes the effort to get out and meet new people.  That’s something I’ll be doing diligently, every time I’ve thought I’m too busy but gone to an event anyway, serendipity has been at work and it’s been worthwhile.

2. Reading outside your comfort zone.  For me, That’s the Economist.  I might not have the time every week but this habit has won me new clients in the past who were impressed with my knowledge.  And it’s the agenda setter so you are never short of conversation for point 1 – schmoozing.  I always remind myself of that when this habit lapses.

3. Proactivity and creativity – yes – that’s what clients are paying for.  The wilder the better I say….today’s crepes and harp ensemble at a forthcoming press launch went down very well.

4. Creative folder for ideas.  I have a word document called ideas and I keep adding to it.  The best ideas come at the strangest times and then get forgotten quickly.  There’s probably even an iPhone app for this by now.

5. Get to grips properly with social media.  This is my goal for the year as clients in my space are now waking up to its importance.  And now it’s so much more established there are so many excellent case studies to draw from.

I have cut Adam’s list of 10 down to five – that’s more than enough to be working on for now.

Happy 2011!

One recent experience illustrates the extent to which the business world has changed irreversibly as a result of the recession.  It has to do with the traditional roles between pr and journalist being eroded as independent media outlets look for new models to ensure they can survive.  It stands to reason this would happen, because advertising revenues are ultra tight.  So why not offer content or editorial instead, bypass the traditional peddlars of content, the prs and go direct to the client?  I have seen this model at work in a number of sectors, with some blatantly touting their ‘pay to play’ editorial policy and others being a bit more subtle about it all.

Although that’s not exactly good for business, what interested me most was the way it alters the role of the media.  Journalists are supposed to be independent, gatekeepers of information for the wider public and reporting facts objectively.  I see this trend as throwing new light on the notion of ‘objectivity’ that journalists apparently need to have. When I did my media courses at LSE we looked at the way objectivity cannot really exist and is automatically subjective since we are all shaped by our experiences…and this looks a prime example….