I am drawn to consider the way that Google operates and how that affects manufacturing SMEs in our promotion where we have a relatively small audience of a special type. We are in the main addressing engineers, designers, buyers in a technical arena and of course it is important to bear this in mind.

So the important part about presenting information online is that it be valuable to our audience.

Support of the technical media is core to this process and plays a major part in the information stream where we can see that the flow of information tends to go from supplier to customer. This enables the customer to evaluate what they can expect from a prospective supplier or their products – but without a convenient way to tap into this information stream then customers are restricted in their research and their choices. Who of us does not recognise the value of a “good” supplier and the difficulty of finding or replacing one. Industrial trade and technical media, magazines, websites and directories provide this information flow and the opportunity for suppliers in the market to feed into it for general consumption.