Disqus - Latest Comments for kbeares

Re: Listening is a basic, human element of your business. Why is it so hard?

kbeares — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:10:51 -0000

Historically, we have always had a rude Q&A and a disclosure plan that our marketing teams wrote up early in the development life cycle. In the past these documents we used to prepare our employees for how to have a discussion before something like a large trade show with customers who are in attendance as well as press who may engage you in a discussion.

Once these documents are created, we communicate out to our product teams and/or bloggers through email and face to face meetings. We share these documents and discuss their meaning to make sure that there is no ambiguity. As a community lead, this is a topic of discussion when I am communicating the community plan to the team.

This process and set of documents easily translates to our more Web 2.0 savvy employees who like to blog / tweet / fb.

It certainly does not completely insure that you will not have a leak, but definitely helps to communicate to the employees that there actually are people who are concerned with what is said to the public. Most employees do not even know that they could play a role in leaking company trade secrets.

This problem has always existed, it is just a lot easier to have a conversation with our customers than in the past.

Re: Listening is a basic, human element of your business. Why is it so hard?

kbeares — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:40:32 -0000

Exactly! You can never prevent a leak, you can only potentially lessen the damage with making sure people know what is safe to talk about. Hopefully the leaks are only what you described, more severe internally than externally. The worst thing you can do with a leak is add more fuel to it.

Re: Listening is a basic, human element of your business. Why is it so hard?

kbeares — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:52:51 -0000

Good point Sean on companies fearing or not being comfortable with customers airing their dirty laundry, but if they are in that frame of mind, they need to realize that this conversation will happen whether they like or not.

Another distinct problem exists around the disclosure by people inside the company sharing what they think is harmless information, but when rolled up with all the harmless sharing of inside company information, it adds up to a leak of a companies trade secrets or information on an upcoming release. Companies need to make sure that their employees are aware of their disclosure plans and what are safe things to talk about and what are not.

Kevin

Re: Twitter and Facebook – Marketing teams new misunderstood tools

kbeares — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:42:27 -0000

I could not agree more. I also would like to add that you can't just create a page on Facebook and/or create an account on Twitter and just post information for people to consume. You have to be prepared to staff these new web properties and engage and participate in the conversations.

Again, it comes back to what are your objectives? What do you want to accomplish? We have done this with Microsoft Windows Home Server, Small Business Server, and Essential Business Server and we are having phenomenal conversations with our community. We started as using them as extensions to our blog, but now they have become places where new communities have joined in to have a conversation with us. Very valuable community platforms.

Only down side to these properties is that you do not own the content that you publish like you would with your blog. You can't take it with you and move it somewhere else. This is why we try to continue to make sure that we aggregate our conversations on Facebook and Twitter and post what we have learned on our blog.

Re: The Anthill is Exploding! Welcoming Caitlin Angeloff to the team

kbeares — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:46:09 -0000

Congrats Caitlin and AEV. You will do great things!

Re: TechMeme: the anti-linking engine

kbeares — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:31:46 -0000

Not surprised at this at all Robert. Not saying it is the correct way to calculate who is most relevant. The meta point I take away based on what you are shaing in this article is that you all ended up on page 1, right?