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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Last week 761 developer customer questions were answered in our online communities by members of our customer support staff. These are the folks helping to bridge the knowledge transfer gap for .NET 2.0 and 3.0 that I talked about last week . The effort also represents a shift in our support strategy...

Something I'd love to see Microsoft do more of is small, simple, solutions to annoying problems that would delight customers. Here is a perfect example. Google Gode Prettifier A simple Javascript and CSS file, the Google Code Prettifier makes syntax highlighting in a web document super easy. It's pretty...

I'm often asked how products teams can best participate in their online communities. It would be simple to say "go talk to customers" and be done with it, but you can have a more targeted approach than that. They key to successful support communities is facilitating knowledge transfer between those...

There is truth in every recomendation from the following post. Source: Creating Passionate Users: User Community and ROI In Building a User Community Part 1 we talked about the importance of not only a strict "There Are No Dumb Questions" policy, but also an even more dedicated "There Are No Dumb Answers...

The interesting thing is that the same forum could be hosted in different widgets on different sites if I read the post correctly. Freewebs continues to add to their widget catalog with their new forums widget. This customizable plug-in is available for use on your Freewebs page or on another website...

Brain, a PM on the forums.Microsoft.com site, discusses the element of adding game like systems into discussion forums. While over at the www.asp.net site they've recently created a new point system. What do all the web dev guys think about their system? Update : Here is the description of the...

Feels like this concept is more tested than I imagined. There are some good comments from the post I made last week . I also got an offline pointed to this presentation: http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm This covered a lot of the concepts that I'd been thinking about.

While I was in China the forum engineers pointed us at some of the more popular forums. These forums had an interesting Virtual economy. Rather than simply rewarding points for participation users could also exchange their reputation between one another. One example of this is http://iask.com/ . Our...

We are looking at ways to improve both the page load times and discovery of the forums on the default http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn page. The proposal we are looking at is to collapse all the forums on this page by default and to use script (rather than the current postback mechanism) to expand each...

And although this entry won't post until possibly Monday I'm currently two and a half hours into a 10 flight to Tokyo. From there it's simply a short hop over to Shanghai where I'll be spending the next week working with the developer support staff that will be helping customers out in our online communities...

This is an interesting thread that shows the search habits of folks on C9. What stuck out to me was that it shows that no search should be inclusive by default. Meaning that the forum search should also be searching other relevant content on MSDN like blogs and wiki content. And then there is this, that...

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it's probably true. You know that slick site you put together on the intranet? The one you spent time brainstorming about so that every bit of information conveys what you want your teams to know. The one you spent countless hours re-organizing information on...

Check out: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718682.aspx A little late on my part, but great work on the new MSDN support page Katie & the MSDN team! It's a great step in the right direction for helping customers navigate their support options. Some clear improvements here over the older...

I've been doing a lot of writing lately. All that extra keytapping, however, was going towards a Thinkweek paper that was submitted just thirty minutes prior to the deadline at 4:30pm yesterday. My paper, entitled "The Evolution of Customer Support", is the sum of a body of work that myself and others...

Just indulge my thought experiment here. This is not a commitment or even a direction, but more of a... "brain fart" if you will. What if the MSDN Forum site, instead of forum like, was more live QnA like? What if we just used Live QnA? If you haven't checked out Live QnA yet then you can try it out...

This probably took to long, but we've created two "lounge" type forums on the MSDN forum site for folks to have non Q/A focused conversations. This came as a suggestion from some of the volunteer moderators and was pretty easy for us to do. Enjoy! Via Joe I just created two new forums: " Hot Technology...

Betsy has a great post on how to build live QnA gadgets. Live QnA is a question-and-answer service that emits data in XML format (RSS). While we do not offer at this time a specific API beyond the RSS feeds that you can generate from search, you will find this is actually a robust way to expose content...

Update #4: You may now download your hotfixes without contacting support! ... this was the biggest issue that most customers seemed to have. Fixes for the other issues will also be coming online shortly. Thanks for all your feedback. Update: To be very clear. This experiment was performed by several...

It's one thing I've learned watching the progress of the MSDN forums over the last year+... there are bad questions. I'll be watching to see how well this sort of "rate the question" system goes over. Something new has appeared at Yahoo! Answers . A rating toolbar for each question and for each answer...

First AOL did this, now Google is lowering google groups visibility. Seems to make sense since they don't seem very speedy about updating groups functionality. Maybe they'll get wise and update it one day with a real conversation search . Google got rid of the Froogle and Google Groups link on top of...