Update: The Micro Motion community has moved into the Flow group in the Emerson Exchange 365 global user community. Links below have been updated to point into the flow group.
I’m checking in over at Emerson’s Micro Motion CommunityFlow group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community today to see how the growth of this community is coming along. In the post, Communities to Find Answers and Solve Problems, I shared some statistics on the size of the Micro Motion community. There has been growth in members, friendship bonds, posts, comments, videos, and more since last report.
A view of the What’s New? Page shows quite a bit of activity over the past two days. And the timestamps show that participation is happening around the clock, so likely the community is either global or there are a number of night owls who love Coriolis flow and density measurement late night discussions. My guess without digging into it is the former.
A good example of a recent post:
I need to know if anyone has information about Coriolis in Flow Measurement of Heavy Oil Petroleum 9 to 11°API, with high viscosities.
Emerson’s Pat Page, a member of the Micro Motion sales team responded:
We continue to have success in measuring heavy API gravity crudes. If you would like to see performance for a particular application, send me the flow details and we can provide flow calculations with pressure drops and accuracy.repeatablilty data. [email address]. Need to know what the flowing viscosity and temperature will be.
One of the things you’ll notice as you look through the various forum discussion threads is high participation from the Micro Motion team. This is one of the success factors for communities centered around products and applications. In some threads, process automation professionals have offered strong opinions on what they don’t like or believe is missing from a product. This feedback and ongoing connection between customers and the Micro Motion team is just what Micro Motion president Tom Moser was seeking in his February Intech magazine Executive Corner article, Online collaboration: A win for all of us. In the article, he cited an Aberdeen Group study, which noted:
…organizations realized a 93% improvement in their ability to capture consumer insight that drove a new product or service development. In addition to contributions to new product development, these organizations achieved an estimated 63% customer service cost reduction and 82% improvement in identifying and reducing risk to their brands.
Although this community centers around Micro Motion Coriolis flow and density measurement, the videos area currently has 9 videos including videos showing Rosemount pressure measurement devices and DeltaV SIS safety instrumented systems. Applications often span many products and technologies, and videos are great way to quickly show how technologies can be applied to solve problems.
I saw a first peek of this community at the 2009 Emerson Exchange from Mike Tongwarin, who leads this community. It has come quite a ways from its official launch in November 2009. The community will continue to grow if the current ingredients remain intact. These ingredients include the members continuing to find value in the questions they ask and the answers they give, the Micro Motion team continuing to have strong senior management support, and community managers like Mike continuing to inject energy and enthusiasm to foster wider and deeper participation.
