Flutterby™! : new media, new marketing

An excerpt from an internal email, I don't want to get too in-depth because... well... as should be obvious from this response we're discussing how open as a company we should be, but I'll excerpt a small bit that I responded to:

As I sent this out, I realized it might be nice to have an internal blog for just such idea swapping. Could even be an external blog if just constraining the dialogue somewhat, but internal would be freer.

A conversation to have is one about how constrained the dialog should be. Part of what Scoble has done for Microsoft is giving it a human face, not just in his own weblog but by encouraging various developers to get out there and talk about their jobs. The boundaries are still being decided, but occasionally now it's possible to see who fixed a particular bug, and for some of the long-standing bugs the discussions about how these finally came to the attention of the person who could fix them, and the process by which the problem was solved, can be interesting.

Not so interesting that I have a particular example to point you to, but interesting enough that I've read through a couple of them.

It's a trade-off, between presenting a human face to potential customers, and in so doing acknowledging that there may be flaws and imperfections in the company, and that sometimes competitive advantage may be compromised, or presenting a polished shiny face. The advantage of the former is that it's more interesting and may bring more eyeballs to the process, we just have to figure out if they're the right eyeballs.

I think Doc Searles and the rest of the Cluetrain gang are full of hoohey in many ways (although they manage to get a lot of attention and appear to make a reasonable living at it, and Doc has done a bunch to help out some of my favorite tech causes), but markets are, indeed, conversations, and we need to choose whether those conversations are going to be had in the stilted formalism of conventional business, with trade show booths and four color glossies that have been through committee, or informally in the heat of the process.

I prefer the latter, but I also realize that I am distinctly not a market sample, and I understand that while there are opportunities in the informal, there's been a language developed for these processes over the years, and there are a lot of customers who are very confused if the form of the communication doesn't match the expectations of the customers.

Think of it as the difference between the expense account lunch with the marketing guy and the shared beer in the bar after the show with the developer. The question is: do you want the drunk developer more visible in your marketing efforts? Surprisingly, the answer may be "yes".