The leaving mail
One of the hardest emails to compose at Microsoft is the leaving email, so I tried to keep mine short and simple, let folks know I was moving on, thank them and give them my new contact information. We Microsoft employees live and breath via our email, so leaving pegmc@microsoft.com is one of the hardest parts of leaving Microsoft. I think I wrote a pretty good one, and except for the one slip, where I accidentally hit “send” instead of “send personally” on one batch of emails. (Send Personally is an awesome product by the way, highly recommend it…)
Friends,
After 26 managers, 19 office moves, 12 years, 6 divisions, 5 major reorgs (couldn’t add up the minor ones…) today is my last day at Microsoft. I have been offered an amazing opportunity to go and work with Neudesic, one of our Gold partners, in a job that pulls in all the favorite bits of my time at Microsoft and rolls them all together. More tales to follow.
Thank you so much to my friends and coworkers who have made Microsoft such an incredible place to be over the past decade. My personal contact information is below and attached. Please update your address books, and do stay in touch.
Peg
I have had wonderful responses from people, and for a smaller company it’s amazing how many people are fans of Neudesic. I am being reassured it’s nice on the outside. I’ve also had some follow up questions…
First, my new job:
I start April 9th, I will be in California the first week (April 9-13th). I am on vacation next week, and yes I am open for lunch, except Wednesday.
Yes, I will have the opportunity to work with Simon again, and I am looking forward to it, a lot.
Neudesic is a consulting company based out of Irvine, California, with offices all over the US. I will likely be commuting for the first few months, then based out of Bellevue with the occasional trip south.
My official title is director, strategic communications, and the job is working primarily with the technology leadership group, helping to build the technical brand of the company, community, influence and reputation. It’s a new role in the organization, and I will be in the technical team, working for the CTO. That being said, we will be doing more definition in the first 30 days, and as I get to know more about the role and the company I will gladly share. Try and stop me.
Second: Yes, really, 26 managers. As a side note, technically, I only changed jobs 3 times.
Dear Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn
I like your site/tool/offering enough to give you my data so you can place more accurate ads, get higher end actions and charge more. That ad space is all yours. I will actually click on those ads if I am interested. I understand this is a business exchange. As far as I’m concerned, that’s our relationship. You offer me a great way to keep in touch with my friends, manage my reputation and keep up with what’s happening in my industry. You let me keep an eye on my nieces and nephews, you helped connect me with my son. I like you.
I know you or your partners monitor my activity and extract things like my time-zone, interests, influence and and network relationships. I know you know when I am travelling, when I leave work and when I bought that piece of contraband hardware that shall remain nameless. I know you or your partners have correlated my various online identities and use them all together (no matter how separate I think they may be). I know that every piece of data I put online is potentially public.
But, my contacts are mine. You can abstractly profile me all you want, but do not use my name to reach out to my contacts, especially without my permission. I am what people call a connector. I actually know all my LinkedIn contacts, or have at least met them at a conference or in a meeting. I have engaged socially with all my Facebook contacts…or I wanted to. I am a connector and a collector. I often randomly introduce people I know who might be able to help each other. It’s what I do. I don’t want you to do it for me. I don’t want you to dilute my impact by pretending to be me. Branched Out – I’m talking to you. Facebook is not my professional network, it’s full of friends, family and coworkers I like.
Google+ you haven’t earned enough of my trust or given me enough unique value to give you that much information. I still remember Google Buzz. You kind of need to prove yourself more, and why do I need another network? I like having LinkedIn as my professional network and Facebook as my personal network, with Twitter as a broadcast medium. And why are you asking me me to build profile groups for you? tsk tsk – to lazy to build your own algorithm? Ping me, I know people who can help you do that.
Thanks!
Peg
I Don’t Hate That Airline; I Hated Them at the Moment
When I think about social media – I tend to think more on the social side, the engagement, the opportunity to listen in on a conversation to understand the tone and manner before you participate. Other people sometimes focus more on the media side; as a channel to push out a message, or as a quantitative tool to measure and analyze sentiment.
If I am having an average day at work, I’m not Tweeting about the products I use, how I use them, how much I use them. If I make a referral, it’s usually a request. My Twitter stream goes by pretty fast, so even if I have something to add, I will probably miss it. I have never Tweeted about my Mini or Mindjet mind mapping software, both of which I love and recommend frequently to others. Twitter is awesome for finding folks to have dinner with at a conference. Especially if I already know them and they follow me. Okay it’s also excellent when at a conference to find burning issues and talk about room changes. I once had a speaker make an incredibly inappropriate comment in his session. I had ample Twitter feedback before he made it back to the speaker room. The session feedback was far more delayed.
When I watch and listen to our customers (to clarify when I say customers, I think about developers and technology leaders) I see them chatting to each other, more often about live events they are participating in, than giving average feedback.
I just think the audience presence is too skewed to represent anything of value in terms of sentiment, or even early warning, especially without other cross references. The sample is nowhere near random, and the actions are not representative of a full spectrum of activities.
As a support escalation mechanism it’s great. I rant on Twitter, and if a company actually responded, (and followed through) I would be delighted. I always check Twitter first when my Netflix stops streaming, if there is an update on Twitter I don’t call or email support…I wait, and I’m not as mad as before I checked Twitter. And I don’t hate that airline, I hated them at the moment, and Twitter let me get it out. I hope they don’t build a whole marketing plan around it…
Are Influencers and Social Media really like Church and State?
Rant of the Day
Our team is working on a new product launch, and since we have been shuffled recently we are pulling in an extra person to help with the social media planning. To date it’s been pretty much just another owned push channel, nothing too exciting or engaging. I happen to know a great guy who understands the company, understands technical audience, and understands influencers and community. Stellar reputation, he wrote many of the best practices people are using in the company today. I am pretty excited he might be able to give this sad group of channels a little push start towards engagement and affinity, So what was the question I was asked?
“Yes, I know he gets community and influencers, but does he understand how to make social media engaging?”
Really? Where did the perception come from that customer engagement and relationship building is new just because it’s online? How on earth did we get to the point where you can have a marketer who is a social media expert without understanding the audience and their needs behind it?
If the great un-follow is about to happen, I hope it takes self-proclaimed social media experts with it, and lets the people who understand customer relationships take the helm of this ship.
Ahh, that feels better.
What is Reputation Worth?
I know this brilliant guy, who other brilliant guys love to listen to. I discovered in conversation a year ago he had over 2000 unpublished blog posts. I finally convinced him last week to write his own blog. He was worried his ideas weren’t perfect, or weren’t finished. I worry that an idea is nothing but words on a page if it isn’t shared. And his ideas are definitely worth sharing.
There is an ongoing joke among my coworkers, that when someone pops up on Linked In, they have decided that it’s time to look for a new job. It is probably true a lot of the time, that’s why I first joined. There was a lot of uncertainty on the team I was part of, and it was a great way to maintain connections with the people I have worked with, without acting outside of integrity in terms of mass downloads from the corporate address book. I wasn’t actually thinking of it as a tool for recruiters at first.
Now it’s become something more. I use Linked In as an instant credibility check. If someone says they are a Software Architect, and they aren’t at least connected to someone I am connected to, I am a little doubtful of their claims of authority. If someone is an expert in Social Media, I want to see what their connections are and how much of work history beyond last year is tied to communications and online media. I think Linked In paints a far better picture of professional credibility than Twitter.
I recently saw Scott Hanselman give a presentation to community leaders at TechEd US, and he was imploring community leaders to start blogging again, and to have honest conversations about their relationship with our technology. Too many techies have given into the fanboy in 140 characters or less. I say it again; Twitter does not an influencer make. If I am looking for a speaker, or a writer, or an advisor, I don’t read their twitter stream, I read their blog. If I find a blog with great content or good ideas, it gives me the power of a customer voice to share with our engineering team, which (as Scott said and I agree) has far more weight than an employee’s thoughts, ideas or complaints.
I will admit to not tweeting much, I am more of a listener, I like to know what my customers and influencers and communities are talking about, I like to know what’s top of mind. To me Twitter is a temperature check, but a blog, or a strong online profile that is where online reputations are built and checked.
Marketing and Developer Communities
It’s been an interesting forage over the past few weeks into developer community and influencers at Microsoft. I go back to my first week here, ten years ago. I came here from a small dotcom in Vancouver where the only thing buggier than our code was our leadership team – but that’s another story. I had to quickly pivot my skillset from generating positive coverage, to managing coverage. It was no longer a matter of cold calling 30 people hoping one would return my call, but deciding which of the 30 solicitations I would return for the most value.
Flash forward to today, and everywhere I turn there are digital marketing gurus, social media mavens, and the most recent, word of mouth marketers. New names are being generated to distance each new round from the previous, as people stumble into communities and groups that they are ready to engage and delight.
The problem is one that is unique to Microsoft and a handful of other companies. We have existing communities, and influencers, and relationships. Our influencers come from the pool of people who invented blogging, and tweeting, chatting and social media. And much like people need to relearn PR/AR/IR when they come here, our marketers need to learn that managing community and influencer relationships is not a new discipline in Microsoft and they are not at the forefront. Newsgroups, blogs, and forums came from our community, not the other way around.
Our MVP team has done an amazing job of building a global community management program and team. MSDN and TechNet have been on the forefront of forums and chats since their inception, and our field evangelists have deep relations with the most influential community members, because they are neighbors and geeks together, and have been for years. Our engineering, product management and partner teams have been leading customer advisory councils and panels and forums since the beginning.
So the challenge we really face is: how can we as a marketing organization add value to these communities and help make them better, stronger and more engaged. Marketing should not be building technical or enthusiast communities. The communities already exist. We should be in helping those communities be stronger, more sustainable. We should be identifying new communities, new influencers, new challenges. We should be thinking about how to measure the impact of the community, and even how do we identify what community is. How do we tie together the fragmented efforts to create a single voice. How do we help not randomize our most important customers and how do we distribute the weight and voice across all our communities.
What if we turned everything we know as marketers about social media on its head and listened to the people who created it?
Stay tuned.
Pulling, pushing and joining together community
I have a new job title “Developer Marketing Manager, Community and Influencers”. It seems fairly simple. We have a bunch of influencer programs here: the MVP program, the RD Program, various partner programs, and customer programs, regional programs. All I need to do is pull them together, do a SWOT and needs analysis, push out some interaction guidance and I’m done. Right?
What if engineering, planning, support and marketing worked together on community and influencer programs and helped to support each other’s efforts, what if the community understood what the different programs and people were? How big is the community really? In my case, I think I’m looking at between 800-1000 people. I think we currently interact with about half of them. I don’t think we know who the other half is. I also think we have a 30% overlap between programs…the same people floating between communities, and I think if we were more cooperative about it, that 30% of overlap could be replaced with net new, for the same cost, and no impact in the existing community people, if it’s properly managed.
I’m running into a lot of “We already tried that and it didn’t work”, or “So-and-so already does that, sync with him/her.” It’s frustrating. You tried it and it didn’t work – great – what exactly did you try, why didn’t it work? Did you try it a different way? If she’s already doing it – great, but is she doing in a way that is effective and encourages collaboration? More than it’s being done, am I allowed to ask if it’s being done right? Is this team considering that that team is reaching out to the same people?
What complicates the problem is that the very nature of community and influencers, people and relationships are at the core of our success, and traditionally, we are not very good at quantifying relationships, and if you can’t quantify something, it’s hard to get long term support within the company. How do you measure the impact of depth relationships in a company where we target by month or quarter?
