A Guide to Becoming a WOW-Maker
Photo by Daniel Y. Go. It’s really great to open your email and get a compliment or hear something nice that a customer posted about you or your company on social media. I call that “Customer Wow” and believe that…
What’s a Community Manager’s Secret Weapon?
About 18 months ago I wrote a post on generosity, the secret weapon of a community manager. And since that time one of the best places that has emerged for conversation about Community has been the Facebook Community Manager’s Group.…
The Minimum Viable Beta Program, and how to build it.
Let’s say you’re starting a new company, feature, or product. You have an idea that you want to test with some beta customers. So what would you do today to “get out of the building” (in best Steve Blank Lean…
Running a “Friends of the Company” Usability Session
One of the best ways to learn how real people view your product is to ask them to complete a set of tasks that you think all customers “should” be able to do. Think of this as a directional usability…
What’s a best practice, and how can I get one?
If you talk to customers for any length of time, you’ve probably been asked, “what’s the best practice for that? And how can I get you to deliver best practices to me?” I often struggle with this question because o…
How do you quantify the value of an online community?
Online Communities are similar to and different from their physical counterparts What’s the value of community? How can you define both the idea of a community and the value of that community for a marketer? A physical community can be…
Success is getting one person to believe in you
Ray Ozzie appeared out of the Seattle mist today to share a very important lesson of startups and of business in general. He shared the story of how Lotus Notes started – and it sounded a lot like other stories…
What’s the point of trying a beta product?
Beta Customers are the Best Test Customers You Have In Steve Blank’s excellent blog post on Startup First Principles, he describes a startup as “an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” A key driver in…
Why experiencing a product is better than explaining it
You know the feeling – trying to explain something to someone who is not picking up what you’re putting down. So what should you do? Explain, or Listen? As a product marketer, you might often feel this emotion when you…
