"Communicate Or Die"

"All alone in the night" was originally entitled "Point man" - but I couldn't get a really good analogy going between being the first blogger in a Microsoft group, and being the first guy through the door in a game of XBox Live Counterstrike, so I went for a Babylon 5 reference instead. Now I'm thinking that maybe I should have stuck with the combat reference, since I just got my first baptism of fire from Jeremy Wright. "None of the teams are communicating in any real way", ouch. "The useless SMS", double ouch. "With the exception of when they're launching something", triple ouch (medic!). So, while I run desperately for cover and hope that my teammates will be along shortly to back me up, here are some painful truths to admit:

  • Do we know that we're not really communicating with all our customers? Yes.
  • Do we all know about blogs? No.
  • Do some of us think that it's the best medium yet invented for communicating with customers? Yes.
  • Are we setting out to prove this by doing it? Yes.

I take your point about newsgroups - and I'd expand on it by arguing that newsgroups are a better medium for support, while blogs are a better medium for ideas. If I just want to know how to do X with product Y, I'll go ask in Y's support newsgroup, but if I want to learn how to do cool new things with Y, or complain about how it makes doing X really hard, I'll go to the blog of someone who's passionate about it. Heck, my team won't even have a newsgroup until marketing thinks up a name for our product, so where am I supposed to talk to potential customers and find out what they really need? You've got it, right here :-) Let's talk...