I'm a royal pain in the RSS
[photo credit: Heather Champ from her Work in Progress] [I call it, "me, with more robot"]
Ask anyone who works with me...or who has ever worked with me. I'm a royal pain in the ass. Seriously. I spent many of my days ranting and raving. You see, as the community advocate, I go into work and bitch about things like the mac uploader and the fact that we still don't have photo rotation or nice URLs to the photos (which explains why I can't use them on my blog yet).
And the engineers, who are brilliant and work hard and are great guys, every now and then (but not often) lose patience with me. Which is so not productive.
What I need to learn is how to get less swept up in the passion of the community and become a better 'bridge' to communicate the needs of the community to my team so that we can really start to kick ass.
That's the new 'reverse' role of the Pinko Marketer. How do we become both effective at being part of the community voice and part of the corporate team? This is the real issue for a (read:this) Pinko Marketer.
Since I pretty much suck at it (but, dammit, everytime I'm proven right about my rants, which is most all of the time [lol], I bite my tongue from saying 'I told ya so'), I've set up a page on the wiki to start to discuss this. [and I know, charts and research and stuff...engineers aren't too jazzed about the following statements: "just trust me" and "I just know, I can't explain it...it's a feeling."]
[tags: pinkomarketing, cluetrain, marketing]
6 Comments:
In no way is it ironic that you're holding a card saying 'human' yet sporting bright red 'devil' eyes... :-) Tagging people...clever idea!
Anyway, I'm starting to come around to the Pinko Marketing ideal, but I think I still need convincing that the peer to peer communication age is really here. I don't doubt the technology is here, but there still seems to be a stumbling block when it comes to the entire community wanting or even being able to communicate in the first place....
Communciation is key, and even South Korea, with the highest broadband penetration in the world, is only at around 60-65% internet usage...
You labelled the page "How To Talk to Your Boss" but seems to be looking for how to talk to engineers.
Engineers are easy, really, they want to be loved (or have their products loved by extension), but painfully feel the lack of a systematized approach for accomplishing this.
There is a long answer for helping them connect with this, but my lazy shortcut answer lately have been introduce them to Kathy Sierra's work, and let her handle it. I've never met an engineer that didn't fall immediately in love.
Though the older generation of engineers can be more hung on fetishizing business speak, so either you talk about passion as pain appropriate.
You have to talk to, and market to engineers just as you do your customers. They are just another community with slightly different needs. If you listen to them the same way you do your customers you will understand what they need.
Engineers love to build cool stuff. Help them understand why the thing you need is cool. Let them hear (and talk to) the community to understand it themselves. Or try to mix the boring and mundane with the cool.
You wouldn't say "trust me" to a customer, now would you? You would show them. So do the same for engineers.
And listen to the engineers too. They probably have some excellent ideas than can be merged into those of the community to make a better product for everyone.
Where are the Pinko Marketing t-shirts? In pink of course! A mens small please.
When I'm writing code, and some tells me for the 4th time that there is a problem, and I know about the problem, and I've already explained that we lack the time to fix the problem this month, then I can get irked. What I want, in that situation, is for people to talk to my manager. If my manager says, "Drop the other stuff and make this your #1 priority" then we could get it done fast. Otherwise, it waits.
In short, be sure you are talking to the right people. If the true point of resistance is the manager above the engineers, then that is who you need to talk to. Or the level of management above that.
If I was working with limited resources and marketing came to me with a request like a Mac Uploader when I was trying to get the core product up and running, I would probably get upset as well.
I would request specific projections showing why spending potentially months on a platform with 2% market share would be worth our effort. I would ask it was worth it to stopping fixing bugs to start working on a new client.
What do you estimate the support costs for a second client would be?
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