Bright Ideas

Great article here on this media company. In all honestly, it is well written and does a great job capturing a snapshot of Design World and WTWH Media. We are out to make a difference in the marketplace and know we have to be willing to work harder than ever before given the economic environment. The key for us is we know (its obvious) the nature of media consumption is changing fast, and moving fast (and smart) is critical to creating value for our customers.

And my favorite quote – “These guys managed to position themselves as the smart online guys when traditional publishers were still either trying to get up to speed with digital media or just faking it,” said Matt Kinsman, Folio’s managing editor.

February 2009 Issue

Volume 4 Issue 2: Features Motion Control, Off-Road Equipment, Fastening & Joining, and Sensors. In addition, a Engineering Research Guide on finding accurate technical information and a quick look at Design and Manufacturing South -conference and show overview. Plus all your favorite departments including a very cool Motion Control Classroom by Loren Kamstra- application engineer from Groschopp.

All articles + much more are found online>>

January 2009 Monster Issue

Twitter is making it harder to write a full length post. Anyway, January print overview: 272!! pages of  engineering  content. Features the 2009 Leadership companies. Other features include:

Outsourcing
Motion Control
Networking
Fluid Power
Patents
Semiconductors
Mechanical

All content online as usual and the 2009 Leadership is going live this week.

SMS Coming in April

For the April print edition of Design World, we’re rolling in a new way to deliver whitepapers, catalogs, case studies, and other PDF’s immediately to the end user. In print, there will be instructions next to supplier offers to use SMS text capabilities by way of cell phone, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc to receive the document. The PDF can be viewed on the handset and is also delivered to an email address.

For suppliers, this is a one-step implementation.  We get a PDF white paper, application note, case study or technical data sheet and  50 words highlighting the offer. We do the rest.

We  assign a special code for the print publication. Readers then text the specific code via their handheld device for immediate retrieval of the PDF offer.

To see how this works, more information is available via  SMS- of course. Try it out – simply text on your mobile device: DW 1001 (and your email address) to 77007.

Or since you are already online- fill the form out below to receive.

Campaign Tracking Beyond Initial Landing Page with Google Analytics. Part One – Tagging your Links

One of the things that Google Analytics does well is give site owners the ability to track visitors to their site from start to finish during a session.  However, if a visit is initiated with a click from a enewsletter or email without some special link tagging, it’s difficult if not impossible to pin point what advertising campaign brought this visitor to your site. To solve this problem you will need to add a few extra variables to the link that’s going to drive traffic to your site.   This way when the visitor clicks on your link and arrives at your site Google Analytics will see these variables and create a “campaign folder”. Without these variables your visitors will be placed in one of the three default folders, referral, organic or direct. Visitors coming from a paid campaign get tossed into on of these and it’s impossible to tell who’s who. [Read more]