scooblog by josh ledgard

And this is likely to be the last post I make to this blog. By the time you read this I will have likely handed in my card key and celebrated with the great people I’ve worked with over the last 7 years.

One of the key values that Microsoft instills in teams is an entrepreneurial spirit.  I’ve also never experienced full time employment outside of this walled garden. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the 26^th I'll be joining the leadership team at Telligent Systems to run a new team focused on the managed platforms experiences.

I'll be based in the Seattle area and the developer community won’t be rid of me either. I’m looking forward to experiencing life on the other side of the fence and helping to grow the great communities on the Asp.Net, Silverlight.net, IIS.net, and WindowsClient.net family of sites.

Over the last seven years I've learned so much from everyone at Microsoft, and along the way I've had a chance to work on lots of cool projects including delivering tools for CS students and teachers, writing IDE automation libraries, opening new community channels for our developers, and helping to change the way Microsoft works with, supports, and engages customers on a daily basis. As a customer and shareholder I hope that Microsoft continues to push the envelope of corporate transparency and customer engagement as a strategic advantage for the core platforms.

I'll miss the teams I've been a part of the most.  What's hardest to communicate to customers and interview candidates is how every team here has its own culture, sparks of innovation, and unique collection of individuals who care deeply about shipping great software and pushing each other to succeed. 

If you'd like to keep up with my new adventures, the Internet offers you several solutions. If we’ve met you can look me up on the ever so trendy Facebook, subscribe to my blog on http://ledgards.com/blogs/josh (I promise to post more than recipes :-) ) or send some old school e-mail to jledgard@gmail.com. Thanks for all the commentary and great feedback I’ve received from you all on this blog and I hope you give me the same BS detection and rowdiness wherever I engage in the future.

If you read this before 6pm Monday, the 25^th, and you are in the Redmond area I'll be hanging out at the Workshop Tavern in Redmond (7541 Leary Way NE).

For anyone that's just learning basic HTML. I suggest this tutorial...

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/12/lolcat-alignright

A co-worker recently asked me to share some tips on interviewing people at Microsoft.  I wrote a few up and figured I'd share them here as well. I love interviewing people and I get a lot of my style and tips from Gretchen since she’s done more interviews than I ever will.  Anyway, here is my perspective on interviewing for Microsoft. 

• In the back of my head I’m always thinking “Could I work for this person” when I make my recommendations.  This approach makes me tune some questions such that I’m honestly hoping to probe into areas where I feel the candidate could teach me something. If I feel like I learned something during the interview it’s always a good sign.  It also helps when to think about this when looking for diversity of thought… what perspective or talents does this person bring to the team that we’re missing?  
• For Microsoft PMs I generally look for “well roundedness”.  The vending machine series of questions I ask are designed to go after aptitude for interaction design, technical architecture, and testing.  Since PMs are best when they can be a jack of all traits I don’t expect ideal candidates to excel at every competency, but I look for strengths in all three (dev/test/pm) since you’ll eventually be working with every discipline, writing code one day, and helping people test the next. 
• At least 50% of my questions have to be ones that I ask consistently. The rest of the space I reserve for customization based on the resume or role.  It helps set a good bar. 
• I always like to start interviews (after chit-chat) with the standard “canned” questions for which most people expect such as something that’s really obvious from the resume.  I think it puts people at ease for harder questions. 

Anyway, feel free to share your tips. These were just the ones off the top of my head. 

There was a lot of good discussion in this one, but I tried taking notes on my windows mobile phone.  I'd say it was an experiment to see what would happen if I had "twittered" a session or if I just wanted to make sure I thought about the notes I took... but the truth was that my notebook was dead and I couldn't find a pen on the short notice when the good ideas came out. :-)

Good communities create cycles of community rituals. One example was a community where the influencers all decided that they would see who could post the most from 4:40 to 4:50 on Thursdays.  :-)  It's up to community managers to both instigate good rituals and reward the ones created by influencers.

The next question is about what's the least software you can create to enable rituals. Can the software be flexible enough to support the rituals and guidelines that have been established over time? 

Move people with agendas to another community... "perhaps AOL is a good place for them." :-)

Registration screens can be a great tool with proper wordsmithing to convey your sites culture. Color and flow also help.  By all means... avoid ugly communities.  Ugly communities lead to argumentative members. 

Don't ever attempt to stifle or limit the conversations. 

Incentives

• Influencer relationships such as the MVP program
• Connect them to your product teams so they get insider information
• Software coupons and give-aways. New reward every year.
• Need rigorous process to qualify the MVPs
• Visual, Branded, recognition is important.
• Meet in person at the Microsoft Summit.
• Help your customers be successful by helping them develop new business opportunities.
• Cisco site does rewards via the visibility... if you've reached a certain point level you are a Pro.. Then you can do interviews with them where they get to show off their chops.
• Give people more functionality and access to private clubs that are outside of the main community. Make them feel special
• Make it very easy to do what you want them to do.  Model the behavior for them. Seed the behavior.   Give people real time results and feedback on what they've done so they don't waste their time.
• Earning rewards doesn't work.  But you can create a network of people that are willing to help you.  Be a facilitator to content.
• Identify people that are active in the community to empower them. 
• It's really important to help newcomers because lurkers will look to see how new questions are handled before deciding to post themselves.
• Giving people a chance to start smaller groups can help get people engaged.
• Others have tried many times, but they don't have critical mass and the small groups don't take off.
• Does this hijack traffic from the main lists that people use?
• Idea: Ask questions back to the people that show up looking for answers. get them locked into participating beyond just asking questions.  You could make it a requirement to answer some silly questions when they get an answer.
• Idea: People don't land on your welcome pages. How do you use elements of the welcome page to the thread pages that people do land on.
• Idea: Audio prompt or animation that shows newcomers how they can get engaged.  Make it more accessible for people to make that first interaction.
• Make sure your site is optimized for search engines.
• Idea: Put a certain amount of content that people can see in front of private communities. Maybe an area for non-logged in people.

Designing for your goals

• Idea: Give people "their page" to start from rather than a default home page.
• Generate points and reputation that match the creation of content you are trying to incent.
• Idea: Need to overlay social networks to create localized knowledge networks where people become more comfortable.

Internal versus External participation

• Getting people in the company to participate...
• Cisco gives people monitory rewards to get employees to participate in thier communities.
• Others have tried goals for employees, but it's hard to get people to participate.
• Really need to let employees talk to customers about what they are working on.
• Create private groups with influential customers if you are afraid of leaks, but you have to be willing to accept some risk.

Users needing permission

Fear of public speaking online

• Setting the Stage for Participation
• Important to meet and greet newcomers to establish culture and trust. Flickr did this when they started. You have to give people their start.
• You set the scene for people in your community that gives people social que.
• Show people what good behavior, appropriate topics, looks like
• People can be more creative when you give them some boundaries.
• Idea: You need to create hooks that frame the discussions.  "I don't have time for 'boards'", but pull quotes from the community draw people in as they are browsing sites.
• Great book called "Company Command" - On the "Front Porch" you visit with colleges and peers.  Need a dynamic "here's the draw" pull into the communities.
• Meeting people in person early and often welcomes people to online venues, but how do you get more of this online? Make sure to gather community members at conferences.
• Instant engagement means you need "instant feedback" that guides the discussion
• Concept: Communities are less about content and more about connection people to people. Give them people they are comfortable to speak in front of.
• Idea: Send people compliments, let users be transparent with each other to help reputations develop.
• Move from "here's the content" to "here's the content & the people" - Welcome pages need to show more user centric information.
• Meme: Oldtimers get clickish and insular and don't like newcomers.  You have to always designate areas for newcomers.  New helpers need to start by rotating through he newbie area first before they can get to the advanced niche groups.  
• Feature your contributions from your ideal contributors to get more of that type of user that generates that type of content.
• Having a location for anonymous participation can help shy people get engaged.
• Blog comments have a low bar and forums the bar is higher to start discussions.

Censorship

Trust plays a role in registration and participation

• Idea: Get real pictures for people to post photos of themselves. Create discussions around the photos.

Question: Should there be ads in the community?

• Some people don't care, some people are really opinionated. The consensus was that "if they are done right". 

Question: What are the different methods of putting ads on new Community Sites

• Babycenter.com owned by Johnson and johnson so banners are injected every tenth post.
• Big enough companies will have an ad department that sell ad space. These are the most effective ads, but also require more investment to make work.  In these cases you have a high amount of control over the ads.

Topic: Can the community control the ads instead of Google?

• Ad serving networks aren't sophisticated enough to create a good matches and often create poor or offensive matches. There are hundreds of high profile ad serving networks and not all of them work best.
• No proactive ad filtering can be bad.
• What happens when Slingcommunity.com serves Slingbox alternative ads.
• People have issues with Google. Community for Babycenter.com had a discussion on abortion and the ads for abortion clinics came up. This led to mis-trust of the ad filtering from google.
• Smaller, closed, private communities... could the community control the advertising? Self service advertising that had approval process and ran on a regular basis.  This is non-trivial for smaller/niche communities. 
• What about Digg for your community moderators where they can mod up or down ads that are relevant for their communities?
• Another tab in the community could work for this type of service.

Question: Are there ads in the newsletters?

• Some have no ads in the newsletters
• Some have different departments to serve ads so there is no tie between site ads and newsletter ads.

Topic: Payperpost?

• Opinion: This is a horrible idea to allow in communities because it's bound to get out of control.
• Are larger companies just better off giving their best customers blogs as a reward for their contributions instead?
• People jump all over shills in discussion forums, but not in the blog world.

Topic: How are the community guidelines established?

• Does the community want to slap down the "google guy"?
• Open source community sponsorship ads are worthwhile?
• Everyone would love a site that incorporates a community controlled ad network.
• Create a community ad review area.
• What about digg for community ads?
• What about people that don't participate in any other way.

Suggestions: Dealing with people that inject ads into your community.

• Creating an outlet for the "ad-injectors" such as a "show and tell" forum. 
• Another idea was "Shameless self promotion day"! 
• Banning
• Create a rule about not using ads in signatures
• 3rd party recommendations are a grey area. What's an ad and what's helpful advice and linking?
• What about letting posters choose who sponsors their post? Then their post gets a theme from the advertiser that's tasteful. 

Question: What is working for ads?

• Large concern for relevancy.  There isn't a great targeted solution.
• If the ads match the reason then you can go from .5% click rate to 3-5% click rate.
• Two challenges:
• Profiling users to target ads.  Is there integration between the profiles and the targeted ads.
• relevency isn't that sophisticated.
• Do logged in users click on ads? Do you want them to see ads?
• Pop-up ads or ads that extend over the content cause more user complaints than the reward makes worthwhile.
• People interact via boards via e-mails and then the miss out on the ads.
• Yahoo groups has done a terrible job monatizing the opportunity they have for niche ads.
• What is a new model for ads? Who are the innovative ad companies?
• How can users or companies create the viral content and serve that content through ad networks?
• Is the limitation technology or ideas for clever ads?
• 30 Rock and The Office do product placement right... spoofing product placement while doing it... eating at chili's... scrubs does this too.
• Myspace is starting to do rich content in your ads that pulls eyes in.

I'm at the computer history museum in the valley attending the Online Community Unconference.  I'll try and blog notes as a take them, but the pace looks to be fast and I'm not sure I'll be able to capture much in a consumable form for anyone other than myself. I'll try.

This was a great read that I found through Seth Godin's blog.  

Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

 You know, the person that everyone listens to, makes outlandish statements that may offend people on occasion, and then has to issue statements like this...

Everyone has days and events in life they’d love to push the rewind button on, yesterday was one of those days. Regardless of my opinions, thoughts and beliefs on anything Barry Bonds it was absolutely irresponsible and wrong to say what I did. I don’t think it’s within anyone’s right to say the things I said yesterday and affect other peoples lives in that way.

Source: Public Apology « 38 Pitches

And I love the comments with reference to the rise of sports related bloggers tearing down the need for traditional media. This blog thing really is catching on I tell ya...

"You have successfully eliminated the need for the sportswriter with your blog, so I would suggest that you also choose to antiquate radio by taking your public comments directly to the people in the form of a “38 Pitches Podcast” and dominate yet another form of alternative media."

I posted my experience being hit and run by a car yesterday on my personal blog.  I'm posting the link here as a cautionary tale for other softies I know bike to work regularly.

I saw a red car out of the corner of my eye quickly cut in-front of me and attempt to turn right onto the cross street without a signal. They did this, without knowing that I was right next to them. I slammed on both brakes, but careened into their right front passenger door. I was lucky the force of the collision unclipped me from the pedals. I flew onto the hood of their car and I heard their tires skid from the brakes. When the car stopped my momentum flung me off of the hood and onto the pavement.

Source: Yesterday I was hit by a car while biking to work - Josh Ledgard's Personal Blog

I was on a thread where a dev lead asked if anyone had tips to share on motivating his team to engage regularly with customers through blogs, forums, etc.  Paul Yuknewicz shared a great set of tips that I'm republishing with his permission.

• Get the team managers and leads to see the need for participation.  I lean on them to keep bringing this up in team meetings, 1:1s, and other appropriate touch points.  They should also model the best behavior.  It really helps if you can get one or two managers hooked so they turn into your evangelists (MattGE is an example). 
• Appointed community people in each discipline: PM, Dev, QA, and UE.  They can be the eyes and ears, and help move things along with their disciplines. 
• Talked about how looking in the forums is a fun and easy way to learn how customers are really using the product
• Used metrics as carrots more so than sticks – e.g. emphasizing the people who made the strongest contributions and holding them up regularly in status mails, showing momentum in our trends, etc.  I reward feature teams that collectively do the best work.  I use the sticks more with the leads/managers so they know they need to do better.
• Devoted 1-2 days to have a bash so the team can “get over the hump” of answering one question and marking one as answered.  The team figured out how to navigate the site & tools, they created some lightweight processes, and they realized it’s not that bad.  Some team members (e.g. Spotty) got hooked on the idea after this.  I also got an idea of the points of friction and was able to start addressing those. 
• Follow up, follow up, follow up.  If the team sees this is important in the body language of you, their leads, and the leadership team, they’ll follow suit.

To this list I would add

• Get your GM, PUM, or VP to participate by blogging or answering customer questions.  Brian Harry is a great example of leading by example in this respect.
• Make sure people realize that you really aren't asking that much. If everyone in devdiv answered one customer question a week… well, there aren’t that many questions to answer from customers.
• Make sure people are empoyered to talk about what they are working on and are rewarded for constructive transparency that helps educate customers. Nothings worse than trying to answer a question fo a customer when you can't tell them the real answer.

How do you motivate your teams to engage with thier customers? Is it important for you? 

Yes, Amazon has the best social software on the web.  They've been quietly innovating for the last couple of years and it is unfortunate that people just think about their amazing catalog of user reviews and don't think of them as an innovation hub for social software. 

The reason is because their social software just works is because it does so by focusing on the goal at hand... create a trusted brand for consumers to share information that leads to product purchases.  There can't be much fighting about ROI there because the goal is clear... it's social software that's designed to help you buy stuff. It has a <gasp> purpose!

That crystal clear focus is something that's missing from most people's heads when they go about designing social software. No one asks "what's the purpose and how will this help drive value to our companies core deliverables?"  If they do then they ask the question after they've designed and launched the features. 

Just throwing up blogs, wiki's, forums, and reputation systems without asking "why" is probably better than choosing not to do so, but only be the slimmest of margins... because if you've got a great product... someone probably already put up those services for your customers whether you like it or not.

The following article got me thinking "what else has Amazon been working on and why is it the best social software no one talks about?

Source: Amazon Should Get More Props at Like It Matters

Amazon really deserves to be thought of as a top innovator in terms of developing a Web platform, socializing information, coordinating attention and providing relevance tools.

Lets reverse engineer their social software features and guess at the success metrics they've got in place.  The latter task being something you'll find a challenge with most social software unless you get all hippie on me and say "it's all about just being there... man... it's about connections and stuff...dude". 

1. User Reviews: This is the granddaddy of social features and is really their bread and butter.  The goal was to give people more confidence in their purchasing decisions by allowing them to see what people who have the product say about it. It's information you just don't get when you're in a brick and mortar store and aside from the tax savings is probably one of the best reasons to shop online.  The metrics used are probably the number of reviews, breadth of product coverage with reviews, and average review rating... the "was this review helpful" buttons. 

2. Customer Images: The caption you can't see with this picture is "The Zune works really well in cold weather".  Thankfully the moderators have a sense of humor.  The real problem here was that the stock images can't nearly convey the feeling of seeing the product in person. They could never take enough pictures themselves of every product, so they outsourced that job to other customers. If customers were willing to write reviews why wouldn't they want to share their images of the product.

As silly as this image is it conveys the size of a the product in a way stock photos of iPods and Zunes don't do.  The clear goal is to offer as many alternative views of the product as possible to customers. How soon before that "watch" link contains user submitted product demonstrations and review videos?  I'll bet within the year.

3. Related Searches: Because there are no isles to browse in online stores outside of second life (hold that thought) you need to give people links to searches. What's interesting here that you can't see is that this is now both implicit and explicit. I can go lower in the page and suggest alternative searches for other users. I could suggest iPod as an alternate search. This, to me, demonstrates Amazon's interesting choice between being an explicit or implicit driven site. They know that neither is complete so they offer both for users. 

The goals for this prime real estate are likely around providing links to customers that cause them to search more if they don't click purchase on the product they are viewing.  Keep users on the site, searching around, until they find what they want. It would be cool to see a click-through map of these links and I bet there are metrics around it.

4. Wish List's, Registries, and Friends: Amazon has had these features forever. What's great is that it's a social feature represented online that replicates real world social traditions.  Everyone already has their list for Santa, registries, and tell's friends about good deals.  Their goal is to leverage the online world to make these activities people already do, seamless. They aren't trying to redefine the concept of wedding registries, they are simply trying to make gift registries better. 

I would have goals around registries created, the number of registries created by customers that bought off of a registry for someone else (how sticky is it?), and the number of times users sent e-mails to friends and % of time those mails turned into paying customers. 

The only thing they are missing is maintaining an explicate friends list that shares their history, lists, and purchasing decisions with me without him telling or my asking. But you can see how they are really close to this today. Update... they do have this, but it's on user profile pages..

5. The "Am I an Idiot?" Feature: I'm sure they have another name for this, but I like knowing that I might not be alone in my choice of purchase here by seeing what other people in my situation decided based on alternatives available.  This is something else you can't do in person, but can do through the power of social networks online.

Sure, you have to adjust your definition of social networks, but that's what this is. I'm now in a network of people that viewed this page and ended up buying headphones. It didn't make the list, but the best part is that nothing is really hidden here and I didn't have to claim anything for them to present that information.

This is a networking feature that most other social networking sites haven't figured out how to integrate well.  What data do you have that might validate a customers choice, their online reputation, or the real strength of their social network?  I guarantee that if you think for a minute it's not just the explicate self described information that you can't validate about someone or can be swayed by troll voters online.

6. Social Search: I hadn't even noticed this, but Amazon is building the data to create a truly customer driven search result set.  Today the goals are probably around just gathering information, but when they roll out true social search they'll be able to rate the results by looking at how often the social results lead to purchase versus the non-social results you get today. 

7. Discussions: No social software is complete without discussions, but I think their solution would probably be better if they had a yahoo-like product driven QnA focus here.  What's happening today, you can see from the titles, is that several users are confusing this with the review system. Good information is being captured, but I doubt they can get really good metrics off of this and they are diluting the value of the review rating system they have by giving people a way to opt out of it. 

Out of all the features, this one feels like it did just get tacked on without a real goal. And if the goal was vibrant discussions... even bumping up to the MP3 players section will show you that they don't come near the vibrancy of non-amazon communities that talk about MP3 players. You should never have discussion just for the sake of it unless that's your explicate goal. :-) Not knowing what the discussions are being used for leads to poor design choices that don't serve the needs of your communities.

8. More Lists: Everyone can write their own "12 days of Christmas" song on Amazon. This absolutely makes shopping social through their virtual marketplace.  Lists help drive search results, help customers find alternatives, and connect them to other users that they could ask questions of.

9. Guides: Why hire editors to write product guides? These people on the Internet are way more knowledgeable than any sales clerk you'll find in circuit city. Goal guides created, but here they probably push for the creation of highly rated, quality guides. Anyone could put a list together, but writing a great product guide takes lots of effort. If only they had some sort of...

10. Wiki: It's only a matter of time before product guides are wiki articles. It even contains an entry point that's hidden that's only a step or two removed from integrating a stumble-upon feature into the Amazon store. See the "random article" link?  How soon before they have a way to replace bad product descriptions from Amazon's editors with a pure wiki? 

Today I'd imagine that the wiki is in experimental mode and that they are simply offering the service to see what the usage looks like in order to determine more concrete goals.  Is it to replace the need for paid for product descriptions? Is it to create FAQ lists about products? Is it to enable people to write great product guides?  Today it is a little buried in the UI to have a real purpose, but this article already answers one of the first questions one might have when looking at a Zune that the product description doesn't directly tackle... why would you buy a Zune instead of an iPod?  You can also find out why they offered a brown version in the wiki.

11. People Search: Find just about anyone and what sort of things they are into.  I bet you have better luck finding a friend's amazon page than finding their blog. Not everyone has a blog, but just about everyone buys something online.  I found my cousins, uncle, and dad. I can see their lists, and get a birthday reminder sent to me in advance of shipment dates requirements.  The main goal here is probably to make it easy to figure out what to buy people, but it wouldn't take much to turn this into a lot more social experience with shared shopping, chats, and blogs. 

12. Rich User Profiles & Reputation: No claims, just the facts about what I do and what people think about what I do. 

Some things to notice about their profiling system.

a. The employ badges that cover both online metrics (top reviewers) and offline attendance of events. (See the community forum 04 badge)  Badges are used as a nifty little reward for top user inputs.

b. It lets' me pivot by their tags, uploaded images, products they've highlighted, etc.

c. I can subscribe to a feed of their reviews, but oddly missing is the feed for their tags and wish list updates. 

What do you think? I think it's a pretty impressive list of social software features that I imagine will only continue to get enhanced in the next couple of years with user submitted video reviews, product guide podcasts, and better connections between the main product page functionality and features like the Wiki & discussions that will get more defined. 

Like I said, the most impressive feat is that they balance experimentation with features that are clearly designed to solve business problems with creative usage of social media. It's that tie between business goals and features that I find most impressive and leads me to say that they have the most impressive set of social software features in the web 2.0 world today.  Prove me wrong. Show me another site with such clear ties between a business problem, customer need, and features that aren't just for the sake of features. 

Your customers have greatly evolved since the previous internet bubble, while most company’s customer support models have not grown with them. New, “Web 2.0” paradigms for content creation, publication, syndication, and consumption bring with them an enormous innovation opportunity for businesses needing to talk directly to millions of customers.

Because of this gap between customers’ needs and current offerings, up to 80% of your customer support budget is potentially being wasted. Currently, that money isn’t improving customer satisfaction, driving market share, creating buzz, generating great content, or (most importantly) helping customers be more successful. Most companies current support models no longer match the expectations and behaviors of your customers.

Today a huge percentage of our developer product support is delivered through traditional 1:1 phone connections. My goal is to flip the ratio to a 90% focus on “many to many” customer connections and further our support dollars to touch a larger customer base. It should become an exception when a solution given to a customer from Microsoft is a private conversation, and it should be the norm that solutions are published into our customer communities.

With this goal comes its share of challenges.

1. Culture Shock: Customer communities have been largely ignored in the past. They’ve developed their own culture of free assistance, codes of conduct, and rules that most support organizations have to adapt to. We’ve seen these growing pains first hand while introducing our support staff to our volunteer moderators. A classic example of this is a support org that wants to answer every question and customers that don’t want to do homework for students. The community is right. Your support budget shouldn’t do homework for anyone. J

2. Mixing Paid & Free: Classically the stance that’s been made is “Post in our communities and take your chances or call us and pay”. If you want nearly all of your product support handled in public it means handling paid support in public as well. Clearly there would be value in sharing all the knowledge gained from paid support questions with customers but it also would make it seem like we would be doing so to off-load our support burden to our customers in order to reduce call volume that’s costly. How do you rationalize paid work in a world that’s been volunteer driven? I’ll have follow-up posts on potential solutions.

3. Making Public Mistakes: There is a safety net in 1:1 support. If the answer given by a support technician happens to cause data loss over time then at least the damage is localized to one customer. If the same answer is given in public is has the potential to cause data loss for hundreds of customers and then you’ve got a big problem. Your support organization probably prides themselves in having high customer satisfaction and sorely want to avoid causing dissatisfaction through transparency.

4. Support Contracts can Make you Money: Not all support costs you money. What if you have a model for support that is either a value add for your product that sells more products or if you actually use product support AS your revenue stream?

5. Tools: Most community sites aren’t built around enabling both ad-hoc free for all assistance, discussion, AND paid support scenarios. If you look at the problems we’ve been having lately with our forums you know that these challenges aren’t insignificant.

6. Being Agile With Support: Your customers expectations change quickly so your support process needs to be flexible enough to handle it. Typically, in an outsourced support model you define a very strict process and set of rules so you can make it simple enough to save money and hand off to 3^rd party vendors. Today your customers may expect support in forums, but tomorrow they might expect you to chat with them in real time right when they have the problem. You have to have a way to adapt support process more quickly.

7. Who organizes this customer engagement: Is it really just a challenge for your support organization or should the people that make the product be accountable for the issues encountered with its use? That’s why there is no simple answer to Bill’s challenge. Viewing community engagement as purely a support or purely as customer marketing engagement is wrong. It’s every organizations opportunity.

8. Classic Support Metrics Don’t work and even new ones need tweaking: Measuring per incident customer satisfaction, time to resolution, and engineer utilization efficiency doesn’t work in public. You aren’t answering a question just for one person, there is a different quality versus quantity balance, and rigid metrics don’t generally allow for the agility that’s required with doing support in many to many environments with the help of customer experts. We’ve tried measuring community answer rates versus Microsoft answer rates and I think they are better than some other metrics I’ve seen the numbers have caused problems with users marking answers aggressively.

9. Your product has to be supportable and worth being supported: Don’t throw crap over the wall and expect people to help you sell it. It takes the right product, the right amount of customer interest in the product, and the right amount of knowledge transfer that starts to customers the day you start on the drawing board for your product.

I hope this starts to define the problem for people. Now I have to start answering these questions before 761 turns into 100,000.

What do you think? What challenges would you face if you had this goal?  What should I be worried about?

This is the last of the notes i took at the Summit that I was able to actually write down. 

On Forums…

“After posting an answer to a question there should be a link that goes directly back to a the filtered “unanswered” page you started from instead of just back to the forum. “

I think this is just a simple workflow tweak that could be provided in new forum UI.

“How do you know which answer is the best answer if there are multiple answers in a thread”

This goes back to a large debate over answer quality. Not all answers are equal. Lately I’ve liked what yahoo answers does here to show the rating directly with each reply about how good the answer was and then bubbling up the top answer next to the question. Check them out and let me know what you think.

“Be transparent about all moderation”

Yup, that’s on deck. We want the community to be able to police itself and call out users that may be abusing moderation rights.

On Other Channels…

“lots of teams used to do technical chats, but it doesn’t feel like they do anymore?”

This was something that team’s used to self organize and it appears that the investment here really has dropped in the last year. What do you think is a good schedule for product teams to do chats? What sort of topics would you like to see covered? No promises, but I can add some pressure to get more chats on the schedule.

And the related “The web chat control is really flaky”.

“We like webcasts best since they are the most well produced and includes slides, downloadable sample code, etc.

“pages on MSDN shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load when we hit F1 because you’re waitng for a tree view to load that we don’t need”

I talked to folks in MSDN about this and it was recently fixed. Library topics will render first and the tree control will render afterwards. J

Dare has one good point and one bad point about the new google mymaps feature that we've had for a while. 

Source: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google MyMaps vs. Frappr: A Feature Isn't a Business

As usual the reactions from the blog pundits are equal parts surprising and unsurprising to me. The unsurprising bit is that I didn't find anyone who compared this to the collections feature of MSN Virtual Earth Windows Live Local Live Search Maps Live Maps which can be viewed at http://collections.live.com. I'm sure when the "Web 2.0" pundits eventually discover we have this feature it will be claimed we copied it from Google. :)

When are people going to stop giving google credit for everything?  How long will the web honeymoon last?  This is one area that we were not copycats... they were.  Lets give credit where credit is due here.

On the other hand what I did find surprising were blog posts like Google Launches MyMaps - Platial Gets Screwed and My Maps at Google: Is Google Doing a Microsoft? from Pete Cashmore and Paul Kedrosky which complained that Google was killing "social mapping" startups like Platial and Frappr with this move. Ignoring that "social mapping" seems like a silly product category in the first place, I wonder what exactly is wrong with this move. Some startups point out consumer demand for certain features from online mapping sites (i.e. missing features) and the consumer mapping sites add the features.

I have one use for social mapping services, but it's going to require a feature that neither google or live maps support today. I want to make it easy for people to share road bike routes with one another. To do this you have to be able to define custom routes between markers and generate good printouts with the directions, pictures, and comments about the routes.  It's not good enough to just map the best path between two stops since you really want more flexibility to say... not take the highway when you are on a road bike.  Then people can collaborate to build some really cool bike routes based on revisions to other routes.