LSI launches a Social Media campaign….

As the sales and marketing manager at Logical Systems, I have had a difficult time rationalizing social media as part of our marketing effort. My thoughts ranged from “Facebook is great for a company that serves the general public, but not for essentially a niche company like ours” to “LinkedIn is great for connecting with customers, but I don’t see useful tools that will help me reach them.” This was all until I saw a presentation by Jim Cahill of Emerson on why they have a social media program (as he goes by the titles “Chief Blogger” and “VP of Social Media”). I remember him saying something to the effect of: “I wanted to find a way to promote the service side of our business by getting the domain expertise out of our collective inboxes and out to the web where people could see what we can do.” I thought to myself “Yes, EXACTLY!!”

So, over the course of the next few days I saw how things like Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare could help LSI. I had really felt challenged to really tell our story – the way we can in front of a customer. I thought about how when I put together a presentation on the massive DCS projects that we have completed, or show a customer all of the great work we do in our panel shops, and how positive the response is; I kept wondering to myself how I could get these stories out to our customers and potential customers. I passionately believe in our people and I see the complex problems we solve every day. Just last month, we implemented a PLC/HMI program change at a customer site in Texas that allows them to produce 30% more product, which opens the door for them to add more capacity and capability (along with many more customers), which then opens the door for plant expansion as the word gets out at what they can produce. What a great story!! Yet, only a select few people in or outside of our company even knows about it (until now). Why should we not be telling our story?? Hence, this is why this blog is started.

The following are my goals with this:

1. Help our customers get to know us better by using the tools we all use every day
2. Help our own employees across the multiple branches and our ever growing numbers of employees get to know each other better
3. Help recruits and potential employees really know who we are
4. Help our suppliers know what our true capabilities are
5. Help me understand what our customers want and need from us via the “conversational” format used in social media.**This is a big deal**

I have so many ideas to write about and I would love to have customers, potential customers, employees, and suppliers comment on other things they want to hear about. Here are some of the topics I would like to cover in this blog:

• Success stories (for instance, we just upgraded a whole MMA plant from a Honeywell DCS to a DeltaV DCS, we are finishing up a greenfield rice facility with Controllogix PLC’s and Wonderware’s ArchestrA based HMI, as well as finishing up a large expansion in a coffee plant with Controllogix and Wonderware Intouch)
• Introducing new talent that we have hired (we have been hiring about 1 employee a month for the last 2 1/2 years and we need to get what they bring to the table out to everyone)
• Helping customers understand how we execute our projects and what our engineering philosophy is (i.e. why things like simulation, factory acceptance testing, and functional specification development are critical aspects to making projects successful in our eyes)
• Introducing new or growing capabilities (we are steadily growing in the MES space, we are adding 24X7 service calls when simply calling our main number, and we are steadily growing in motion control capabilities)
• Talking about areas where we feel like we have great value to offer clients (domain and process expertise; for instance,  how in China we have people that know the following: English, Chinese, AND the technology – ask any customer who has expanded into China and see how many local companies that that they have dealt with in China that can understand all three)

I would be curious as to what YOU want to hear about as this has to be of value to the audience mentioned above. If it isn’t valuable, you won’t read it. So if you have suggestions, please let me know.

-JG

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