Wired refers
to Macromedia as "one of the few companies to appreciate
the new topography of the Web." Why is that? "Because
Macromedia is blogging," they say.
To be honest, we weren't expecting our blogs to become
a hit as quickly as they did with other bloggers and
the media. We thought they'd become popular over time,
but not in a few days. When planning for the Macromedia
MX preview release, the Macromedia community managers
suggested using the blogs as another medium to communicate
on a personal and informal level with the community.
The blogs are an easy way to get MX preview release
news and information to customers quickly. We decided
to try out blogs for a bit and see what would happen.
Almost immediately, other bloggers started referring
to our blogs in their daily entries. Most bloggers
seemed pleasantly surprised that Macromedia was encouraging
some of its employees to create and update blogs on
a regular basis. When Wired wrote
about us, we knew for sure we had done something very
different. I don't think though we're quite ready
for Barbara Walters—yet.
What the h#$& is a blog?
A "blog" is short for a "weblog"
or a web journal of sorts. It's like a personal diary,
except it's published for millions of people to see
on the Internet. Anyone can set up a blog, and they're
really easy to use. The most popular blogs are updated
at least daily. If you don't update your blog regularly,
no one's going to go to it looking for the latest,
juicy content—just like most websites.
Most blogs I've found are updated by a single person
and provide that individual's perspective, although
blogs can also be updated by a team. A popular blog,
which has been around since 1997, is www.scripting.com,
by Dave Winer. (Bill Gates even reads and writes
for DaveNet, although Bill's last piece was in 1997.
Personally, I think Bill is way overdue!) The O'Reilly
Network has over 40 blogs
on its site authored by its staff. And it's not just
technology-minded folks writing blogs. The fashion
industry even has a blog. Because blogs are easy
to set up, many of them seem to be creative or artistic
outlets for their authors—a soapbox of sorts
where people will talk about anything, such as Leah
on http://vacant.cc/
who writes, "It's been about a week since I stapled
my finger."
The benefits of blogs
For Macromedia, the benefits of blogs are not just
an opportunity to announce that, much to popular disbelief,
we do try to bake our own French
bread and eat it too. Blogs give us the fantastic
opportunity to mass communicate directly and quickly
with our customers, in an easy-to-read format, without
going through slow corporate processes. While Macromedia's
online forums are also
a very popular method for discussing our products,
the blogs give our community managers centralized
areas where they can each point out the top topics
that they're seeing in the community on a daily basis.
Risky blogs
When we were planning to set up the blogs, we examined
the risks involved. Should we do this? Should we go
"outside" the standard corporate messaging environment?
Should we associate the blogs with Macromedia? Should
the association be clear or vague? Should the blogs
be personalized for each community manager? At first, we didn't
have the blog infrastructure set up on our own site
yet, so we went with third-party solutions. However, over time, we transitioned to our own server, as you can see in the links below:
You can see an aggregate of all of our blogs at http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/.
Um, what are you doing?
While most of the feedback about the blogs has been
positive, there has been some concerned feedback,
especially from the blogging community. Companies
like Macromedia don't normally use blogs to communicate
with customers.
We had some explaining to do. For example, Blogger
co-founder Meg
Hourihan, found it a little disturbing at first.
She brought up many issues we had considered, and
some that we hadn't. Most notably, she points out
that we don't even link to the blogs from macromedia.com.
Honestly, you may find this surprising, but it's true:
our intent was to get the information out to our customers
as quickly as we could—that's why we did the
blogs in the first place. Everything else was secondary.
We really didn't have an elaborate, detailed strategy
to these blogs. If we had spent time discussing where
the links on our site should be before we got the
blogs set up, we would have lost time we needed to
spend communicating with you.
One of the reasons for this approach for this blog
experiment is that we weren't sure if customers would
appreciate them or find them useful. We wanted to
try them out and see what would happen—like Matt's
French bread experiment.
Sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't. We're
glad that these blogs work for you, and we're planning
to keep them going strong in the future. (I also hope
Matt continues to refine his French bread recipe.
I'd like to try some.)
Blogs for the future
Now that the blogs are out there, we can really start
strategizing. We have some ideas about what we want
to do, but no concrete plans yet. I think we may just
shoot from the hip
and see what happens.
|
