Can automation vendors afford to ignore the marketing potential of the ever-burgeoning range of social networking tools now available? Almost certainly not, as Readout editor Eoin Ó Riain's recent experience demonstrates. He, along with INSIDER, was recently contacted by a mutual acquaintance -- he'd better remain anonymous, at least for the time being -- who had been asked to develop a small SCADA package for a wind turbine and wanted to pick our respective brains for suggestions. We responded in the normal way with a few pointers, but Eoin put out a call to the Automation Linked In Group as well as flagging up the request on Twitter and on his own blog (http://instrumentsignpost.wordpress.com/feed). The result, in less than a week, was approaching a dozen replies suggesting a range of potential solutions. Impressive in itself, but what is perhaps most significant is that very few were either from or suggested any of the major vendors, despite the fact that Eoin had mentioned that our enquirer was minded to use one of them. You can't help feeling that people are missing out here or, as Eoin put it when we mentioned it, "Maybe they are not social-media aware!"
