AviationToday.com: Miami Advice

I seize on any chance to visit Florida, especially during the cold months, so it was with great alacrity that I recently accepted an invitation to chat in person with the folks at Avionica, an avionics company based in Miami.

To be sure, my motivation for making the trek to Miami extended beyond my enthusiasm for Cuban sandwiches, mojitos and water sports. Since its inception in 1992, this entrepreneurial company has produced innovative data interface, collection and analysis products and services to a wide range of end users, including aircraft, engine and avionics OEMs.

The company’s ruggedized service unit (RSU) transformed the avionics industry, largely because of its ability to interconnect with all major OEM flight data recorders. Also, the company’s AVSCAN flight data analysis software is an integrated analysis environment that complements the RSU with support for all major OEM recorder data formats.

These are increasingly important capabilities. From my perspective, though, the most impressive aspect of my subtropical sojourn was the media savvy conveyed by Avionica co-founder and vice president, Stylian Cocalides.

"Web-based marketing is the future," Cocalides emphasized to me. "I believe that marketing should not only convey your company’s message but also be educational in nature. That’s how you get people’s attention."

Stylian was preaching to the converted. Take the recent Webinar produced by Aviation Today, entitled "New Market Opportunities, New Aircraft." (You still can register for this event, by tapping into our Webinar archive at www.AviationToday.com.) This 60-minute discussion delved into many topics, including next generation avionics technologies in new aircraft, such as the integrated avionics suite in Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. Registrants, many of them representing major avionics companies, e-mailed questions to the speakers, in real time. That’s how you capture mind share these days: by providing credible content that’s on-demand, up-to-date and participatory. To access an Aviation Today Webinar, all you need is a computer and a telephone.

By using Webinars and the other online tools I’ve been describing in this column every month, you allow your audience to see and hear information from their desktops or from remote peripheral devices, making your presentation a richer and more interactive experience.

Online communications expedite the extremely fast dissemination of essential information — what Internet wonks call "rapid knowledge transfer." For example, you can use online methods to quickly tell clients or journalists about a breaking news event.

You may not have the time to thoroughly brief your audience on an event, but you can grab their attention by using the Internet to get information to them as it’s unfolding — and by being first with the news. That’s why the news feed in the middle of the home page of Aviation Today includes intraday news updates, not just daily ones.

Today’s news cycle isn’t merely 24 hours; it’s up-to-the-nanosecond, with breaking news that zips along fiber optic cables at the speed of light. If you want access to the latest news in the avionics business, bookmark Aviation Today and make it your first informational stop in the morning.

Take it from an old newshound like me: reporters love scoops. Most of them are shameless little beasts that would unhook their grandmother’s respirator tube to beat the competition to a story. Journalists (the good ones, anyway) are embracing the Internet because it helps them to be first with the news. Our editorial staff prides itself on being first — in timeliness, quality and accuracy.

The mistaken notion persists that Web-based live events are impractical as marketing efforts because the technology still entails too many logistical problems. Several years ago, it may have been a complicated process to set up a Web event to reach a large number of prospects. That’s no longer true. New technology has worked out these bugs and made Web events easily available and manageable. Check out an Aviation Today Webinar to see how easy they are to master.

"People are suspicious of conventional marketing but they’re receptive to content that’s informative," Cocalides said. "That’s the direction to go."

That’s good advice, from an avionics expert who also demonstrates a thorough understanding of new media.

John Persinos is publisher and editorial director of AviationToday.com. You can reach him at 301-385-7211, or jpersinos@accessintel.com.