I can only speak for my slice of the manufacturing world, the exhibitors of IMTS-The International Manufacturing Technology Show, held biennially at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL. 

Here is what I see; the adoption is slow but growing. 

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1. Why did you start using social media?

TechniksUSA is a very careful company and we like to do our homework in both our products and our marketing efforts.  We’ve moved to almost entirely to digital marketing over the past few…

Below is an excerpt from NielsenWire that is certainly worth paying attention to if you are in the B-to-B marketplace:

January 2011: Online Video Usage Up 45%…

Lead generation from their Websites is the number one objective of most manufacturers and industrial companies that I talk to. Yet, their existing Websites have little to no lead generating capabilities.…

It took a long time for me to understand that there are some common denominators in why some fantastic brands fail while other, inferior products, are successful in channels marketing programs. Below you will find six key points to think about. Think of these six as cylinders in a car. If five of them are working but not six you've lost all forward momentum.…

When Göran Fredrik Göransson founded Sandvik in 1862, he knew nothing about web based social collaboration. He was an innovator with ideas and solutions that turned the industry up side down though, and as he was constantly visiting customers around the world, he definitely knew what important ingredient social collaboration was for success.

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Even as Congress and the Obama administration flirts with shutting down the government every two or three weeks, federal employees and contractors are complaining they are being kept in the dark on how they would be affected if a shutdown happens.

Federal union leaders all but begged administration officials last week to share the government's shutdown plans, but they were left empty-handed.

Is anyone really surprise by the lack of transparency from the Obama…

"How do I tell you that you don't know what you don't know"

I've had this same discussion far too many times. In my very humblest of opinion there are no experts yet. The entire space is evolving so quickly that what you thought you knew a few hours ago has changed. A new outlet has sprung up, a new option, a new potential way to use an existing tool, more people have arrived on an outlet and the dynamic has changed.

1849 and…

Government contracts present significant opportunity and potentially significant risk. Success in this industry depends upon specialized knowledge and expertise in government contract statutes and regulations. Inexperience can lead to cost overruns, lost profits, disputes and costly litigation, as well as sanctions, serious fines or penalties. TD Government Solutions has the insight and knowledge to ensure compliance with…

Criterion Machine Works is a small manufacturing company in Costa Mesa, CA. They've been in business for 75 years starting as a job shop serving the movie and then defense industries. They developed a few of their own products during their job shop days and evolved into a product driven manufacturing company.  The past two years have seen the manufacturing sector in America decrease by approximately 50% and they were not exempt from that decline. They slashed their budgets, inventories, and…

Founded in 1938, Kennametal manufactures a broad range of advanced materials and components that deliver superior wear resistance and peak performance in demanding environments.  The industries they sell to are as broad as their product offering, including aerospace, defense, energy, chemical processing, power generation, and mining.

Lead instead of trying to catch up.…

Social Media is a 'new' way to sell. Selling is, after all, about relationships. People do business with people that they "LIKE" and merely having a website, literature, advertising,etc. isn't going to generate revenue.

What Social Media is doing is creating a new paradigm. I know that that sounds cliché. But I believe that it's creating a new "type" of business. Traditional marketing adapted, very successfully in the 1980's thru 1990's, to creating websites after they had experience…

A shorter version of this article appeared in the American Machine Tool Distributor's Association "…

If you've personally been using Facebook for a while you may have noticed that some of your friends wall posts at first did not appear on your "Most Recent" wall feed.  You may have discovered them later when another friend commented on them. That's a pretty important thing to…

Somewhere there's a disconnect between understanding what's marketing and what's selling. There is a preconception that LinkedIn is a Social Media outlet and therefore is more about marketing.... with a bent to sending out an advertising message. It's more than that.

Selling is a process.  There are numerous ways to engage with customer:

You can meet new customers through cold calling, knocking on doors, or you can meet them through networking events…

"What's the point in sending all of this seemingly useless crap Bernie? Most of the people I know are spending their time actually working?"

I recently had this comment posted on one of my status updates on LinkedIn about a Social Media article..  I've also heard the following in some of my discussions...

"I think Social Media is going to be the next big…