[tracking a TrackBack] David Warnock says in his TrackBack of my blog this morning
Glad its making you happy, David, (and that our comments are giving you tips, etc.). Now, how can we make sure that others find that tip now that its surfaced? I'm just wanting to see all this goodness made usable in the future, not just "sha...la...la...la-la-la...just for today" (hope you don't mind a reference to the Grass Roots.
Much has already been blogged today about Jonathan Schwartz starting his own blog, but I had to also take a minute to applaud his decision to lead by example and join what Jim Grisanzio is calling the Cluetrain Revolution at Sun. The Cluetrain says that in the future only companies which learn how to talk to the world directly and without goopey marketing spin (my words, not theirs) will be able to gain any traction in the new (smarter, networked) markets.
From my point of view, getting everyone to blog is only one step along the road to aligning Sun with Cluetrain. Sun has famously invested heavily in open source projects and is basing many of its core products on open source parts (such as Java Desktop System), planning to increase revenues by adding value to commoditized products. Cluetrain says:
And we see this borne out in the enormous popularity of the OpenOffice.org project user lists for instance. So, if Sun is going to actually change itself to take advantage of Cluetrain teachings, its going to have to learn not only how to have real conversations with customers and others on the web, but also how to be more helpful to customers than they can be to each other. And that's going to mean listening to the questions customers ask and answering them quickly and accurately (and hopefully delightfully).
So far most Sun blogs (my own mostly included) are examples of one-to-many communication, not really conversation. Answering comments/questions and interacting with referrers is not yet part of common Sun blogging style. There is a long-held belief inside of Sun that actively engaging in two-way conversations will take up too much bandwidth, and yet according to Cluetrain we must figure out a way to expand this competency. Perhaps what we need is a new (as yet unconsidered) tool that helps us gather customer queries and publish our responses in a way that customers will find more accessible.
So, what do you think? What information are you looking for? How would you prefer to receive it?
Please answer in my comments section below...can't criticize the tools unless you use them, eh?
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