Social Media at Mentor Graphics

You can often tell how important blogging and social media is to an EDA company by how much effort it takes to find their blog from the Home page. For the folks at Mentor Graphics I’d say that blogging is quite important, because it shows up as a top-level menu item. Notice also how important Twitter is, their latest tweets show up on the Home page just below the logo, a prime real estate position for the web.

I made this handy table to show the nine areas that have bloggers at Mentor:

[TABLE] style=”width: 500px”
|-
| Area
| Bloggers
|-
| Embedded Software
| Felix Baum, Colin Walls, John Day, Ricardo Angualano, Mat Radochonski, Christopher Hallinan, Jamie Little
|-
| PCB Design
| Jim Martens, Patrick Carrier
|-
| Valor MSS PCB
| Mark Laing, Michael Ford
|-
| Electrical & Wire Harness
| J VanDomelen, John Day
|-
| Functional Verification
| Dennis Brophy, Harry Foster, Dave Rich, Mark Olen
|-
| IC Design
| Simon Favre, Martin Vlach, Arvind Narayanan, John Ferguson, Matthew Hogan, Joe Davis, Karen Chow
|-
| Mechanical Analysis
| Nazita Saye, Robin Bornoff
|-
| System Modeling
| Mike Jensen
|-
| Vehicle System Design
| John Day, Mike Jensen
|-

Most of the bloggers are specialized and talk about one area of expertise, however John Day covers three areas and Mike Jensen writes about two areas. If you prefer to receive an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) update when there’s a new blog, then use this: Blogs RSS

The official YouTube channel for Mentor is here. Each major project group at Mentor has their own YouTube channel, and I visit the Calibre channel most often. You’ll find an interesting mix of hands-on How-To videos, plus higher-level industry-focused videos at the General Manager level as well.

Many of the bloggers can also be found on Twitter if you like tweets. Just click the link for the bloggers name, then you’ll find their twitter handle. I read a lot of what Dennis Brophy has to tweet about. The corporate account is https://twitter.com/mentor_graphics/. Oddly enough Wally Rhines, the Chairman and CEO does have a Twitter account, however he has yet to tweet.

You can find articles that mention Mentor Graphics on LinkedIn as well. There’s a separate Group for discussing all things Mentor.

Mentor has an official Facebook page and there’s a funky Mentor Graphics Alumni page (only 335 Likes, and nothing talked about for the past two months, basically orphaned).

Google+ is one of the youngest, yet fastest growing social media platforms, and Mentor posts often on their page. I’ve added more new contacts on Google+ in the past 12 months than all other social media sites combined.

Summary

In the old days an EDA company had one official spokesman and they tended to create press releases, however in 2013 companies like Mentor Graphics have dozens of people that you can read and interact with directly on social media. Pick your favorite medium, you don’t need all of them. The Mentor people that I’ve contacted have always been responsive to questions and comments. Finally, here on SemiWiki we blog about Mentor Graphics as well.

More articles by Daniel Payne…

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