Well... we stalled at 6 comments, however that is promising. Some great ideas and thoughts within the blog, thanks to all.

The question now is what do we do with the ideas raised... Maybe next TPN meeting could review them as part of agenda?

Martin Arcari,
Very well written and I hope that there are more idea flowing in.

Regards, Lim Yew-Kee CEng, MIET Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia

Lee,
As a heavy user of MyCommunity I share your concern. I observe two types of MyCommunity users: (1) those who have it on all day and post frequently, like myself (although mostly these people are IET staff) and (2) people who set up a blank profile, register for a few groups and are never heard from again, and for the most part do not even respond to contact requests, from my experience.

LinkedIn has its place. Earlier this year I benchmarked the IET Tribology Network against the LinkedIn UK Tribology group. This was quite an informative processs and I recommend it. It is worth remembering, however, that the vast majority of LinkedIn users are passive. The LinkedIn groups that I am involved with are posted to by only a few of the several hundred members. Low engagement is nothing specific to MyCommunity and should not be seen as a unique problem.

From my perspective, the IET has its work cut out to compete with the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, TED, YouTube and any number of "pretenders" such as InnovateUK.

I think the IET, as a professional institution stroke learned society, should have an online presence in social media, and that presence should command respect and credibility among serious engineering professionals. There should be nothing "me too" about that and (with respect) I think it is a subtly different aim to the one you mentioned.

Furthermore the IET's online effort needs to be sustained and self-motivating rather than relying on one-off initiatives or gimmicks. MyCommunity also needs to evolve over time in strategic aims, purpose, structure and engagement. We don't need MyCommunity to become the next Friends Reunited. A clear warning sign is the lack of a "mobile enabled" version of the site.

It is a competitive situation - competing for "face time" from busy professional people. It is a strategic imperative to do so, or we will passively contribute to a generational shift in which our kind of activity and institution becomes irrelevant to more recent entrants to our profession. From experience, it is not only in the online arena where the IET misses out on the younger end of the professional demographic.

I am very interested to find out what the IET is doing about it. As it reached into the fundamentals of the learned society / professional institution and what these terms mean in the 21st Century, I assume there is a commensurate top-down view within the IET.

Regards,
Geoff Kermode And no, the loss of line breaks in this message, caused by a less than competently designed social media system, is not the professional image I wish to project!

A good question - I think we need to know the background of my MyC was first created. My speculation, was that at that time the IET web forum was in need of revamping and social media was becoming very popular. Those are for profit platforms and at that time there was a risk of 'what-if' these platforms steer their strategy further to profit oriented & of course there is a legal underlying of the ownership of the contents.So at that time it seems to me the right move for the IET to invest & create the MyC.

 

If we are looking from users’ point of view - we know we are living in the "me-too" environment, whereby many are competing to provide similar type of services. Users then have many choices, and to maintain an engagement on each social media platform requires effort and time - some people (often younger) do better than others. Having said that, there was a research somewhere whose findings are that many CEOs do not participate in social media. (of course the little portion that do are extremely active - like Sir Richard Branson for example).

 

If we look at other 'competitions' - I use LinkedIn as an example, as that's the only one I have just about a time to maintain - it has a huge number of subscriptions - a quick search shows >200m users. Compare this with 150k of IET membership numbers & assuming they are all subscribed to MyC.

 

Yes - these >200m users are not all 'target' market - when we segmenting it further, then we see LinkedIn groups, which then varies from hundreds memberships to ten or hundred thousand members.

 

Having followed different LinkedIn groups, I have seen a "trend" that sustainable groups (whereby you see continuous postings by different individuals, and users are engaging in replies, debate, etc) - are those who have circa 2000 users. Some of the "successful" ones also have a full/part time admin working on it.

 

IMHO therefore, we need to come back to what's the objectives of the MyC. I dont think making MyC as a 'me-too' platform was the motive behind it.

 

We as members come to IET as for a technical and professional guidance, technical content, industrial trends and thought leaderships. IET journals, IET.TV and resource pages, I suspect, are very popular.

 

So to conclude (& sorry it becomes a bit long now), IMHO;
- to simply increase traffic is a wrong motivation
- if we dont know what memberships want from a platform - we ought to ask (right approach from you starting this discussion)
- we can review what contents are the current favourites
- we can 'benchmark' from others
- IET resource pages are still on "traditional mode" - display there and leave there - this is Web 1.0 - we are now on Web 2.0, whereby 'user interaction' is the focus. MyC is an attempt to this - however without compelling content - people like you and me will not come back. Shifting resource pages to MyC would not be a good idea either - integrating and linking the two could be the silver bullet.

What do you think?

 

Lee,
From my personal view of point, maybe for a ‘start’ should organize more ‘talk/event’ with invitation to successful inventors, business magnates and investors, for example, Dyson’s founder ( Sir James Dyson) or the founder of Virgin Group (Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson), etc.

This will definitely increase traffic to Manufacturing TPNs’ blog.

Just a proposal of mine to our team.

Regards,
Lim Yew-Kee CEng, MIET
Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia