It seems Vodafone New Zealand have rolled out their own forums. Thus far there are a few posts – mainly from Voda spin doctor (and really nice guy by the way) Paul Brislen.

We should be positive that Voda is creating a forum for discussion – I feel for Paul – I’m sure he evangelised the forum thing – now he gets dangled out to be eviscerated by the masses – it must be lonely being the primary voice in a forum – it’s kind of like a community… of one.

It would have been great to deploy it internally initially to get some content up, and time will tell how receptive Voda are to criticism. But I can’t help but think that once Geekzone takes it’s traffic, there’s not many potential customers for the Voda forum site. Maybe it would have been better for Voda to partner with Geekzone – let a neutral and independent voice run the community side of things?

On another note there are rumours that Telecom will be announcing some big network changes tomorrow – which, if correct, could balance the cards somewhat given the hype that Voda has enjoyed of late thanks to the iPhone. Miki, my CTO in waiting, has an analysis over here which, while way over my head, should mean lots to some people (or some to lots of people)

Interesting times…..

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

4 Comments
  • Surely you weren’t being that unkind, and really meant the 21st C?

  • I was being that unkind – it was kind of a punny play-on-words

    maybe I should stick to poetry

  • “better for Voda to partner with Geekzone” – nice idea, although I’m sure Telecom would then spit the dummy and Geekzone would somehow lose it’s neutrality..

    Why bother creating your own forum in the first place?!!?. A moderated/censored forum is how it will be seen, especially as it’s not answering a need of “let the people talk to us” (they’re using Geekzone for that).
    *sigh* … just another place to go and be alone 🙂

    Unless Vodafone truly open up and there’s stuff on there that is from the guts of the company … who can write/answer questions on it?

  • Hi Ben, folks…

    Feel free to come on over and see what it’s really like. It’s early days (actually, it’s day two) but we’ve got about 75 registered users and as I write there are about 30 guests mooching about.

    The idea of the forum is to have a place where customers can ask technical questions and we can answer them. It’s self service, it’s part of our drive to free up the call centre (have you ever tried to ring a general telco call centre to ask a specific tech-related question? It’s not pretty) and give the customers the power to help themselves.

    Vodafone UK rolled out its version earlier this year and the response from the customer base has been fantastic. That’s really who we’re aiming at – not the high end geeks but the average user who wants to do something that’s a little outside their comfort zone and needs some guidance.

    Plus we’ll be able to tell you what’s coming up, give things away, try out new offers and services and generally use the technology as it’s supposed to be used – as a place for discussion and interaction.

    forum.vodafone.co.nz

    Cheers

    Paul

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