Macromedia is blogging at full speed

Macromedia has come a long way down the weblog road. A few months ago, the company’s efforts seemed a bit loose and disorganised but nowadays, Macromedia is an undisputable blogged organisation. The “Full as a Goog” weblog lists all Macromedia-related weblogs at http://www.fullasagoog.com/blogsontap.cfm and categorises them according to which Macromedia product they each discuss (Coldfusion MX, Dreamwaever MX, Flash MX, Web Builder), and serves as an aggregation service for news and stories from all of the Macromedia-related blogs. It should be noted that there are more than fifty of them as of January 2003. Some of these blogs are maintained by Macromedia MX product and community managers while others are not. Slightly disturbing is Macromedia’s decision not to include links to any Macromedia-related blogs from its corporate homepage but this is about to change, hints Ed Krimen (2002). Besides, this is counterbalanced by the popularity of several of the Macromedia blogs, as a quick search for any MX product at google will reveal.

Ed Krimen, the Vice President for Community Development at Macromedia who also oversees the Macromedia community managers, the Team Macromedia volunteer program, and the content publishing processes for the Designer and Developer Center at Macromedia, has contributed a manifesto celebrating Macromedia’s innovative approach and advocating the use of weblogs for companies. In his “Blogs are HUGE”, which is hosted at a Macromedia page, he explains his enthusiasm for blogs:

Blogs give us the fantastic opportunity to mass communicate directly and quickly with our customers, in an easy-to-read format, without going through slow corporate processes. While Macromedia's online forums are also a very popular method for discussing our products, the blogs give our community managers centralized areas where they can each point out the top topics that they're seeing in the community on a daily basis.

In what I see as a landmark Macromedia document, Ed Krimen makes a compelling case for corporate blogs. There may have been some problems that Macromedia had admittedly encountered during the launch period such as deciding on an appropriate corporate policy regarding the use of weblogs by Macromedia employees for promoting Macromedia products (“Should we associate the blogs with Macromedia? Should the association be clear or vague? Should the blogs be personalized for each community manager?”), but once the ball had started rolling, the feedback from customers and the surrounding community of developers was too overwhelming to ignore. Krimen conveys a great sense of optimism for the future of corporate weblogs and there is no one who can blame him for that. Indeed, the technology press has hailed and welcomed Macromedia’s revolutionary ‘blog strategy’ as being a step ahead of the game, a move that will certainly mesmerise other companies to join the blogosphere.

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Jeremy Allaire (Macromedia CTO): http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297/

Mike Chambers (Flash MX): http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_mchambers

Matt Brown (Dreamweaver MX): http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/

Bob Tartar (Director): http://btartar.blogspot.com/

John Dowdell (All MX related): http://jdmx.blogspot.com

Sean Corfield (ColdFusion MX, Architecture): http://www.corfield.org/blog/

Waldo Smeets (Macromedia Sales Engineer): http://www.waldosmeets.com/

Michael Williams (Flash Product Manager): http://www.markme.com/mwilliams/

Macromedia bloggers speak with a real voice:

a few of the most popular of Macromedia weblogs

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It’s captivating to see how responsive the market can be to a blogger speaking with a true voice, even when the blog is solely focused upon the products and services that the company (for which the blogger works) is selling. At first glance, one might reckon that a blog discussing products would not be any appealing – besides, who wants to read about dull stuff like Flash MX? And how could anyone possibly associate with a blogger who’s only writing about products his company sells? Well, quite a few people wished Mike Chambers a happy birthday by leaving a comment at Mike’s blog, although he never said when his birthday is. The fact that his ‘customers’ found out about Mike’s birthday from another weblog without him telling them lends further credibility to the business case for blogging. And it is not rare for Mike to ask his buddies about their opinion on Macromedia plans. Recently, Mike, who’s Flash Community Manager at Macromedia, asked for some feedback on Macromedia’s plans to roll out a subscription service (and sixteen people commented on it within the first day that Mike posted the request for feedback), and it was not long ago when he ran a promotion on his blog (in order to test the effectiveness of the weblog as a promotional vehicle) that the response was so overwhelming that Mike admitted he never expected so many people would go for it.

Since then, promotions have been regular at Mike’s blog, exemplifying how weblogs can be put into use for promotional purposes. Mike Chambers’s blog is demonstrably proving that the market will embrace a blogger when he is out there to communicate with the market rather than trying to sell the ‘audience’ on to some PR hidden agenda.

But why stop there? Why not transform Macromedia’s corporate homepage into a weblog? In a Wired News article (Manjoo 2002), published only a week after the launch of the first five Macromedia weblogs, Tom Hale, Macromedia’s Vice President in charge of Developer Relations, explained: “Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really.” The article praised the effort and recognised that “it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired”. Hale added that “Macromedia asks only that its bloggers keep their postings relevant -- no blogging about what they ate for breakfast, in other words. They're free to discuss any aspect of the software”.

There are certain issues to be stressed here. First, it is obvious that unless the weblog is unique, it’s not going to work. Weblogs are an attempt to break free from the dehumanised, standardised, conformant with corporate guidelines on how to address an audience PR speak. This is why they work and Macromedia’s Tom Hale gets it when he says “readers should perceive the weblogs as the thoughts of community managers instead of corporate shills”. No doubt. But then he says that they wouldn’t have been true blogs if they had put them on Macromedia.com. Why? Is it OK for employees to speak with a real voice but it’s not OK for companies to do so? Apparently, that’s what Hale thinks. I disagree with him. Primarily, it’s a matter of mindset. Organisations have been stuck with rigid frameworks for way too long. It’s only because of these mindframes that companies are compelled to traffic their voice to press conferences, press releases, investors and shareholders reports. Channelling one company’s voice into routes more dialectic than traditional corporate outlets has been frowned upon as a mere illusion. But there is no illusion here. It all depends on your definition of a company and corporate (or marketing) communications.