Past surveys have shown that engineers, in general, don’t use social media much. If they do use, say, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube, they use them mostly for non-technical interactions.
These surveys focused on electrical engineers from all specialties so we don’t know how well they apply to our readers. We do know that power industry folks are somewhat unique in that many positions in utilities and supporting industries require specialized, hands-on training. You just don’t learn this stuff at the university or trade school. So, social media may play a larger role in the power community. To find out, we ran our own reader poll a year ago and our results were similar to the earlier surveys.
However, our readership has grown and, no doubt, so have our reader demographics, so we're repeating the reader poll.
You can greatly help us develop ways to enhance user interaction, including forums around particular subject areas, by answering the following:
