My Presentation at Technology Services World

Thanks so much for letting us see this. I think it’s really good.

I’d have to argue with the idea that being a maven improves financial performance. I know you aren’t (quite) saying that … But going through the list of Mavens, I sorta remember that many were very successful before jumping into social media. Isn’t there a maxim that success generates innovation more than the other way around?

As a long-time WT customer and nearly a constant presence on your support phone lines, I must claim that for years you had people on the phones who were chomping at the bit to get into something like social media based support, even before social media actually happened. (WebTrends had some pretty repressive internal policies about communication back in the bad days.) As things loosened up, I could see several of them pushing their ways into it, sometimes covertly. A lot of them are still at WebTrends and still doing it, only now they have management’s blessing. So I think I would add to your “initial suggestions” the idea that you need to find and empower those employees who already have a natural urge in that direction. That this really won’t be very successful if it’s done only by top-down directives. Social media is by definition grass-roots and this recent organizational-marketing stuff is a force-fit overlay of a top-down model .

I’m also surprised that you did not mention the WebTrends User Forum (http://forums.webtrends.com). The user forum entity is an old Social Media archetype that gets lost in today’s obsession with the new forms. WebTrends has had one of these longer than any of your competitors and it has been a successful way of getting your users to get help from other users without (until the last couple of years) sucking up any time from your support people. And, to a much smaller extent, there’s the Feature Request channel on your web site which you seem to use as a purely one-way channel — but it’s still a valid feedback channel along the lines of social media, but not a public one. Finally, there are your Customer Advisory Board forum and the Developer Forum.

Although I’m calling the User Forum a success, I actually feel it’s one of your failures and I’d like to run that by you. It’s a success in terms of using many-to-many communication to help people who pose problems they’re having. And it’s a success in terms of increasing the skills of people who don’t ask for help, but who follow the discussions and learn from them. It’s also a success for those who try to provide answers for others, because they learn something just in the act of answering.

The failure of the User Forums is that WebTrends itself hasn’t learned anything from their content. I challenge you to point to any WebTrends employee who’s filtering the forums’ content to the proper departments, in any kind of systematic, active, or asked-for way. Issues of usefulness and usability have been bubbling to the surface there for years without visible effect, even on communications or documentation. Yet you’re watching the Radian Six ticker tape constantly. Make me wonder about where the hot buttons are. Pundits say that the current forms of social media work well because they’re very public and companies act to avoid bad publicity. I wonder whether the user forums are conveniently overlooked because, until recently, they have been confined to logged-in users and have not been accessible by prospective customers.