The new Developer marketing boy. : Random thoughts

Happy New Year and New Job

chlong — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:21:24 GMT

Where has 2009 gone so far? I can still remember Christmas lunch looking at the Easter Eggs on the supermarket shelves. Bad news for the waist line as I still haven’t lost the extra weight from having the baby… unlike my wife.

Just before Christmas, I accepted a new job in the Partner Technology Specialist (PTS) team and started mid-January. I’m focusing on our Information Worker technology, such as SharePoint and Unified Communications. Another new chap to Microsoft, Jason Clarke is responsible for our Core Infrastructure products & solutions. Together we cover the “North” with our main remit being to help mid-market customers understand our respective technology set as well as helping making Partners more successful.

I really enjoyed my time as an ISV Marketing Manager and in many ways will be really sorry to leave it. This new role though will allow me to closely with customer and partners though which I’m really excited about.

Top 10 things I’ll miss:

Working with our agencies – together we created a new brand for ISV communications, to help make it stand out from the crowd. We still had to use Partner Program orange though in some of our work. Small steps…
Partner-TV – our partner video blog which I’m still going to be dabbling with…
ISV Royalty Licensing – we signed up many new partners to the program this year allowing ISVs to integrate our technology into theirs and really saw some success.
Communities, including the .NET Clusters. Huge thanks to Ellen, Alastair, Eddie, Faith, Ian and Martin for their support :)
Innovation Day Tour across Australia – I did two of these and saw most of the country’s capital cities. Huge thanks to the DPE boys for the comedy… you know who you are. The team used Mesh to pull our presentations together and for backups… Mr Kordahi though used the power of Mesh against me. I didn’t appreciate that with Mesh you give other people the power to make changes and during the last presentation, an ‘extra’ slide was added to my deck. As I turned to look at Michael & Andrew, I was faced with a camera. A great end to a successful road show.
Australia Partner Conference as the ISV track owner… although I’ll still be involved this year from a PTS angle.
Web Agencies and Partners – Silverlight is still on my radar though as it integrates with MOSS :)
Software + Services – I still get the play with our online services which is great for demonstrations.
BizSpark for startups – working with David Sajfar providing tools + software to start up companies.
Working with the various virtual teams, including the other Partner Marketeers, DPE, Hosting guys; Partner Account Managers, the Regional teams, Corporate and many, many others.

Prep for the new role:

It’s been fun developing my knowledge which a month ago was about the 100 level for most of our stuff. I’m going deeper and should be around 250 by the end of the month… our partners are truly the experts though as they make all this stuff work.

I attended the electronic version of our technical training event in Seattle
The day before I officially started, I delivered a 3 hour presentation on what is SharePoint to the Large Account Resellers… poor guys
I have been involved in a number of partner and customer workshops articulating the value of our business productivity stack
I’ve been playing with the “Demo show case” which I remember my old colleague, Chris Parkes, was a huge fan of. Pretty cool resource of virtual PCs for partners, rather having to create your own
UC learning paths to learn more about the latest release of our unified communications offering
What’s coming in the future: Office 14
I’ve learnt so much about customer’s really opinion is of us, which is really refreshing and eye opening

It’s been great fun so far learning about this new side of the business and I look forward to working with you with my new hat on.

Finally, a huge thanks to Julia; Nick; Sarah; Sarah; Sarah; Mike and Kim (save the best to last) for their advice; support; humour and leadership.

Happy New Year

chlong — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:27:57 GMT

Happy New Year to you! On my first day back to the office, much to everyone's delight, I thought I'd record various people in the Partner Team wishing you "Happy New Year" for Partner-TV... click here to watch it.

I have a feeling it's going to be pretty busy over the next few months as so much has happened already: Bill's last day; various mid-year review meetings and planning documents being updated.

I also thought about starting the year with a series of monthly calendar updates... January being the start of the New Year got me thinking about new companies being formed with new ideas. So naturally this got me thinking about our Empower subscription which is our on-ramp program to help new (Registered) Partners launch a product into market with technical support and software from Microsoft.

Any ideas to what February should be?

Click here to download it.

Twitter! Twitter! Twitter!

chlong — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:02:22 GMT

This made me laugh as it's so true...

It took me a little while to understand what Twitter was all about, and all though I'm not as mad on Twitter as @FrankArr or the other guys in his team, it's really useful for events and meeting people.

Although this Digg article makes an interesting read about Pownce vs Twitter. Is Pownce the next social networking service? And for how long?!

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Frank Arrigo

Do you fake it?

chlong — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:32:25 GMT

This article made me smile on ProBlogger, "91% of ProBlogger Readers Don't Fake It", which is a blog dedicated to helping you becoming a successful blogger. So I spent 30 minutes this afternoon doing a bit of research and here's what I found:

What makes a successful blog?

There is a wealth of information out there... but I found reading Darren Rowse's own lessons on blogging interesting, especially comparing his advice to other bloggers, like my old boss, Steve Clayton. For me, I liked this comparison on BlogHerald between writing a blog and riding a bike... practice, practice and practice.

How do you improve traffic?

If you are looking at creating or improving the traffic to your blog, you should check out Scoble's Corportate Weblog manifesto up on ChangeThis.com or read his book, Naked Conversations, with the latter being published in January 2006.

But even though Blogs have been around for a while now (with 1.4 new blogs being created every second according to Sifry), many companies still are hesitant in having this method of uncontrolled PR. Like Scoble says in this posting, somebody was fired for appearing on his ScobleShow recently, which makes you wonder how far some people will go to prevent creating bad PR... Microsoft has really embraced blogging now along with many other companies as you can see in the chart below... but measuring the pros and cons and overall ROI is still a challenge. You can do a search like this one and it just shows you how many people are on the brink of starting blogging but still very nervous about the repercussions.

Information Week reported that General Motors blogging strategy is paying off handsomely. In 2006, the company's FastLane blog delivered an estimated $410,470 worth of customer insight and marketing at an approximate cost of $255,675 -- a return on investment of 67% -- according to a newly released report from Forrester Research. Compare that to 2005, when GM's blog generated an estimated $578,374 worth of information and publicity at an approximate cost of $291,196. That's a 99% return on investment.

I believe that blogging at Microsoft has really made a difference in opening these news lines of communication, especially with the likes of the Blue Monster. People like Seth Godin have published books, manifestos and blogs on how to use new media to reinvigorate traditional business and has plenty of advice on "How to get traffic for your blog" as well.

The long tail is where blogs as a media type really start to come into their own. The power of conversations within smaller groups of people, like friends and niche topic bloggers has a larger amount of influence that a single A list blog may have... this aggregate influence of all of the long tail far outstrips even mainstream media. Read this report on Sifry for more background. Like Robin Good says, "...tags have become a lingua franca of Live Web, helping to categorize social media while also indicating where people’s attention might be at any given moment." You soon know if you have a successful product or campaign or strategy because the feedback is almost instant.

So what's next?

With Blogging taking off in Africa as technology improves, there will be more and more blogs being published... With social network sites being so popular, from Facebook to LinkedIn, I wonder what's going to be the next big thing? Food for thought.

Some stats from Sifry:

Technorati now tracks over 37.3 Million blogs

The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months

It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago

On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day

19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Technorati, Conversations, Blue monster

Live Writer + Soapbox + Facebook = My top 3

chlong — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:55:58 GMT

I'm in the hotel room in Hobart ready for the Partner Roadshow event tomorrow, catching up on email (see view from hotel below - amazing eh?). Whilst waiting at Sydney airport, I was catching up on my blog reading...

...naturally I started with Steve Clayton's blog, where I saw some postings on my 3 current favourite web tools... the first has really helped with blogging:

Get a real spell checker For Windows Live Writer:

Steve found this via Scott Lovegrove, who describes how to install an "English UK" dictionary for Windows Live Writer (beta 2 is now available for download). Please note that this is totally unsupported and totally cool. He also has another new gem for WLW on his blog.

Microsoft's Soapbox video sharing service is now back to being in public beta. It was "closed" to ensure a solution could be found to the piracy issues of a similar nature to those that have had so much attention on YouTube.

The interface has been updated along with IM integration...

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2007/05/28/100-000-new-users-per-day.aspx

My third app is Facebook, which seems to be the latest web craze which really hit the UK as I left. For those of you haven't heard of this, it's a mixture between MySpace and Friends Reunited, ideal for stalking. It's addictive and generated a few interesting news stories, even getting people being fired, but nevertheless good fun. Check it out: www.facebook.com.

Would you be interesting in networking with other partners this way? Let me know if so... might be time for a pilot :)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Partners, Hobart, Windows Live Writer, Soapbox, Facebook

Hugh’s Software Blogcard

chlong — Tue, 29 May 2007 05:37:22 GMT

If you haven’t seen this blogcard from Hugh on my gapingvoid.com widget, here it is... remind you of anything? I love it :)

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003955.html

Are you a Girl Geek?

chlong — Tue, 29 May 2007 05:11:49 GMT

If so, check out this posting I saw this on Anna Liu’s blog today about FITT and an announcement for a new trial Mentoring Program to:

Inspire women in the industry to achieve their personal aspirations and potential AND
Assist women to broaden their understanding of the ICT industry.

FITT has always been keen to create connections for our membership, and Anna believes this mentoring program is a fantastic way to create great connections, support each other and share knowledge. To make this trial will be successful, sign up: http://www.fitt.org.au/mentoring.html

Aussie Girl Geeks anyone? I know Frank is interested! Please ping me if there’s such a thing in Australia...

Seriously though, if you consider yourself to be a “Girl Geek”, also check out UK’s Eileen Brown’s posting about Women Business and Blogging and Raising Your Profile in Technology which mentions the woman business and blogging conference held in Leicester (UK) on Friday 8th June (register here if you're in the neighbourhood and interested in attending).