One of my favorite posts was written over two years ago, back when I was still trying to tie down this SaaS thing. In my post I called for an approach by SaaS vendors to recreate parts of the OpenSource ethos in order to build their customer base and even their product. I said in my post;

Imagine if you will a situation where a revenue generating SaaS product builds a community of such committed users that they become the salesforce, an integral part of the development team and the PR gang.

I was talking recently to a SaaS vendor who is starting to think about how best to build multi-lingual capabilities into his product. It’s a difficult call for this particular startup – they’re self-funded, have the unfortunate situation of having a widely spread geographical base and are limited in terms of available development time. No easy answers or so it would seem.

Enter Zendesk, a great company that I’ve written about many times in the past. Zendesk had this problem a couple of years ago when they were still a small Danish startup (before, that is, the post that allegedly started them on their meteoric growth curve 😉 ). As a small company they didn’t have the time or resource to create their own multi lingual capability. What did they do? The built the functionality and then turned to the customers to populate the actual language data. I talked to CEO Mikkel Svane who commented that;

Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already enabled the new languages on their support portals. We see this as a trend that clearly shows companies are amenable to living with minor inaccuracies in favor of agility and speed

But here’s where it gets interested – Zendesk didn’t have to invest hundreds of developer hours or thousands of dollars to do this – they merely went out to their existing userbase, and the wider social media community and asked people if they were keen to help. The image above shows just how many foreign language speakers are happy to share their knowledge – and all for the simply price of an (admittedly very cool) Zendesk t-shirt.

It’s yet another reminder of the value of the community, letting your userbase feel some sort of ownership and, quite simply, reaching out. So there ya go Dave, there’s an opportunity for you to do similarly.

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Big news for the Kiwis out there – Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell is leaving the company at the end of the year. The Microsoft position was a bit of a coup for New Zealand, one of our own filling a high profile role for a (very) high profile company.

Liddell himself seems upbeat, saying that;

My time at Microsoft has been an outstanding experience, and I am delighted to be leaving the company in such great shape, we have built a world-class finance team and established strong internal accountability. Microsoft is coming out of the economic downturn with not only great product momentum but also strong discipline around costs and a focus on driving shareholder value.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was muted in his comments saying that;

Chris and his finance team have accomplished a great deal over the past four and a half years, the team is deep and strong, and has an excellent record of building value for our shareholders

It reads to me like Liddell is seeing the pain MS will face in the next year or two as it transitions from it’s traditional cash cow product mix to a different one. That transition is going to be corrosive to their revenue streams and share price and he’s no doubt looking at what that will do to his career path.

It’ll be intensely interesting to see where Liddell ends up next. Apparently he is;

looking at expanding beyond being a CFO – He’s looking at CEO gigs and the private equity space

Watch this space.

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My good friend and buzzword slayer Mike Riversdale, is in the habit of slaying the dragons of enterprise newspeak. He regularly bemoans organizations whose collaboration strategy is articulated (somewhat facetiously) by the title above – you know, the organization who pay lip service to collaboration and fully believe that it’s a technical issue rather than a cultural one.

It’s an issue I come to time and time again in two distinct fields – collaboration and social media.

In the social media space it generally rears its head in the form of a large business that wants to “do” social media – either because they see it happening in other business and want to play with the cool kids or (and sadly more often) because some “expert” preaches to them the need for social media (see the Social media Guru video below);

Generally these sorts of organization may implement the social media initiatives, but somehow forget the importance of enabling the initiatives through an organizational cultural shift.

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University gave a presentation looking at the success they’ve had rolling out ThoughtFarmer as a collaborative platform. She shared a cool video that showed some of the same issues, but in the collaboration area;

NEO from Bevin Hernandez on Vimeo.

It’s something my friends who practice in the Enterprise 2.0 space come up against time and time again – but we’re our own worst enemies. I walked the expo floor at Enterprise 2.0 and was depressed to overhear the conversations going on in the booths – everyone is declaring themselves a collaboration platform, focusing on the whiz-bang technology and forgetting all the things that actually matter – culture shift, migration easing, barriers to adoption.

It was discussed in the back channels at Enterprise 2.0 ad nauseum, the need to move away from technology and really find the value, look at the culture and ease the transition.

So yeah, collaboration huh, make mine a double… with cream

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I’ve posted many times before about traditional PR and how it falls dismally short. This post is an opportunity to celebrate some success stories and tell a few sorry tales.

Before the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and in an attempt to make my time as efficient as possible, I posted an invitation to PR staffers with some guidelines about how best to connect with me.

So here’s some bouquets out to some stellar performers;

Kate Hobbie – MediaBrew consulting and Aria Systems. Kate is kind of a token offering here. We were already friends from previous connections when she’d spent time talking to me about SaaS billing in her communication role with Aria so there was some context there. However Kate went out of her way, even picking me up from the airport and playing taxi service for me.

Rachel Peterson – Nectar communications. Rachel I’d also met previously when talking to Zuora and Sliderocket, two companies she works with. Despite not actually meeting up with Rachel this trip, she went out of her way to facilitate things for me, even arranging for me to meet Sliderocket CEO, Chuck Dietrich for a great run on the Presidio

Alison Mickey – Schwartz communications. Alison saw my post and REALLY went out of her way to understand what I’m about. She sent me an email that referenced my area of interest in blogging, and even showed that she’d done some research about my outside interests and hobbies. The briefings she arranged were well resourced and I had enough information before them to make the briefing time valuable.

Julia Mak – Community manager at LeapFILE. Julia also reached out to talk with me. Her company were originally going to demo at Enterprise 2.0 but for various reasons did not. We still met up and had a good chat about where her company is going, and the chat was tailored to my particular areas of interest.

Christie Denniston at Catapult PR. Christie works with ThoughtWorks studios who were demo-ing their Google Wave integration at Enterprise 2.0. Despite being remote from the conference, Christie went out of her way to ensure I had everything I needed, as an aside it was pretty disappointing that despite her staunch efforts, the team from ThoughtWorks never delivered the resource they had promised for my post – you can’t pick your clients huh?

So there you go – anyone needing some awesome PR/communications people would do well to talk to Kate, Rachel, Alison, Julia or Christie – if you’re interested just drop me a line and I’ll make the connections.

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I’ve written before about Apprenda, a company I’ve followed since I started blogging. Their company blog (sadly somewhat silent of late) was one of the early places for vendor thought-leadership around PaaS in particular. I was stoked to hear…

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