We live in the Recommendation Age, the natural extension of the Information Age. With all the clutter on the internet, who helps us decide what to read? Well… you do. We watch videos our friends e-mail us, attend events our friends invite us to, and read news our friends share with us. We pay attention to what our friends and colleagues consider worthy of sharing because we have common interests, we require access to the same information and, hopefully, we trust them. There's no advertisement or piece of press that is more powerful than a friend's "hey, check this out." That’s what the excitement of Twitter and Facebook is all about.
As marketers, if one of your engineers, product managers or customers has written a technical article promoting your company or products, wouldn’t you want to share that information with everyone with a potential interest? Social media allows everyone to distribute information on a mass scale. Better yet, it allows us to target that information to the appropriate audience and receive it from trusted sources. Twittering lets everyone be an individual broadcaster to a network of followers. Go ahead, recommend relevant articles and news items to the people you think need to know. The Microwave Journal’s (MWJ) web site can help you provide industry related updates to the folks you need to communicate with.
On the side of most Microwave Journal articles online you will find an option to "share" a page. When you select this option, you will be presented with a list of several popular sites where users can share stories with a community of users. These sites are sometimes referred to as "social bookmarking" tools. MWJ provides these social bookmarking links as a convenience to our readers and advertisers. These sites are not managed by the Journal and some may require you to create an account to use their features. Be sure to check the terms of use and privacy policies of these sites to understand their practices.
Note that these options are separate from the "e-mail page" feature that allows you to send an e-mail directly to a friend with information about a page on Microwave Journal. Where e-mail is ideal for a one time communication to a few individuals, these share tools help you distribute information to a much larger audience and are better suited for corporate-based marketing communications. Feel free to read our content and share it with your followers. Your friends and colleagues will be glad you did.