This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Brand and company image
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Scoble makes a lot of good points in this article, but the one below really stands out to me is this:
Three, blogs can reduce negatives. Is something bugging your customers? Well, they'll yell about it and yell about it until you listen to them and start having a conversation. Chuq is right on this count. Microsoft has made a corporate decision to change its public face -- I and the other more than 1,000 bloggers at Microsoft are stark evidence of that.
One of the things that Scoble - and the other MS bloggers - provide is a working feedback mechanism. Before Scoble and the rest of them got started, how could you possibly get useful feedback to MS? If you happened to be one of their MVP developers, maybe you could. That's a very narrow slice of their total market though, and the feedback from a group like that isn't going to be all that relevant across the entire company.
Here's an example - I've riffed about things I don't like in Word more than once. Now, I'm just one user, on a corporate Cincom license - if I call support, the kinds of issues I have simply aren't going to get listened to. With blogs though, they at least get noticed. Chris Pratley has responded to Word complaints from a number of people on his blog. Scoble has also been quite good about complaints - follow his blog for a few days and you'll see that he responds to people across the spectrum. What he's doing is nothing less than re-branding MS - slowly but steadily, he's helping make it look less distant and remote. A lot of companies could learn from that.
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