The Lead

First, let's get one thing clear -- if your idea of manufacturing is a bunch of unskilled workers screwing lug nuts onto cars on an endless assembly line, it's time for an update. Today's manufacturing facilities are incredibly sophisticated, with highly skilled and trained workers more likely to be making critical decisions based on computer technology than turning wrenches and driving forklifts.

But I digress. Dial back five years and a meeting with one of these reporters would have likely resulted in coverage of some type 4-6 weeks later in the print publication. Fast-forward a couple of years and most publishers added Web sites, but typically with the same content as in the print version.

Not this time. The day after our meetings, I was greeted with two postings on my blog search tool -- one from Walt Boyes at Control Magazine and another from Gary Mintchell at Automation World. Cool! Instant gratification! But wait a minute -- these weren't the genteel, polite stories that I was used to reading in the hard copy and Web versions of their publications. These were some seriously opinionated postings - letting us know what was REALLY on their minds. It's not that they were overtly negative -- they just had the types of opinions that are usually only uncovered after plying an editor with a few glasses of wine at the end of a long day of trade show duty And you know what? I really enjoyed reading them.

So we now have a new dimension -- in addition to the hard copy and the "official" Web version of a publication, we have the independent opinions of the reporters themselves -- posted on their own blogs unaffiliated with their publishers. This should give companies entirely new insights into what reporters and editors REALLY think. And if these postings are popping up in the manufacturing industry, chances are they're popping up in yours as well...

Now we'll just have to see if anyone reads them!