Small Town, Big Ideas

Now You Can Subscribe to My Blog via Email

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog via email, as opposed to RSS, you're now in luck. Simply enter your email address in the box in the left column under "Subscribe via Email." I'm using FeedBlitz to handle and deliver my email subscriptions—we're using the same service for The Webmail Blog. I’ve looked pretty carefully at the FeedBlitz service and while it’s not perfect, the company seems to be moving along and progressing quickly. If that changes, I'll handle email subscriptions differently—but I anticipate good things.

Please note that I'll never send you ANY spam and you can unsubscribe at any time. If you ever have any problems with this, please email me and let me know.

Blogging Q&A With Northeastern University

I was contacted by a senior at Northeastern University whose advanced organizational communication class is studying blogging. We did an interview over email with regards to blogging and specifically, the purpose of our company blog at Webmail.us. They asked some good questions, so I figured I’d share the Q&A here.

Why did your company begin the blog?

We started our blog in order to create a more effective communication channel between us and our growing number of customers. We currently provide services to more than 12,000 businesses throughout the world and more traditional forms of communication won’t cut it. The blog allows us to stay in touch and keep our customers updated on our business.

Are you the only one who writes for the organizations blog or do other employees contribute, and if so, is it in their job requirement to do so?

We have many contributors. Some occasionally write to the blog, others provide me with information that they want me to communicate to our customers. I encourage people to write to the blog and I require that they at least provide me information relative to our customers, that I can blog.

Where do you write your blog? At work? Elsewhere?

I write to the blog from work and home. Being the co-founder of my company, work is my life... so it doesn’t matter where I am.

What do you see as the primary purpose or aim of the blog?

The primary purpose of our blog is to have an open conversation with our customers, keeping them up to date on everything that happens at our company, good or bad, that might possibly affect the products and services we provide. We run a very transparent culture and our blog is one of the ways to promote that transparency.

What policies or guidelines, if any, does your organization have about blogging?

Rule #1: all blog posts will have potential impact on a customer—they will have personality to them, but they must have impact, even in the smallest way. This isn’t something we were shooting for before, but as we refine our strategy, we think this is the best and most effective way to go.

Rule #2: we will blog as concisely and often as possible. Instead of writing really long posts, we will focus on posting often but we’ll try hard to be short and to the point.
Our goal is simple. We want to be as transparent as possible with our customers and the rest of the world. We want to engage our customers in conversation. We want your feedback. I promise we will listen.

Do organizational members receive any training or guidance about blogging or how to blog?
We don’t provide formal training, but I work with people on improving their writing skills.

How do you generate the content of your posts?

Most of the content is generated by actions we take within the company. For example, we might upgrade a feature or want to make an announcement about a new service on the horizon. From there, we turn that into a blog post.

Are blogs used by the organization in any way to facilitate collaboration among organizational members?

The blog helps to keep everyone the company up to date with the information we provide our customers. An employee might find something out about something for the first time from the blog.

Is there anyone monitoring what information goes on the blog?

Everyone in the company subscribes to the blog, so in a sense, everyone monitors it.

How do you think the blog has helped/affected/changed communication within your company?

It has helped facilitate more of an open communication stream, especially with our customer base... but it has also helped to keep everyone internally informed on what is going on. We all need to know what is being communicated to the customer and the blog is a great tool to help keep everyone informed.

Ben Hubbard

Ben Hubbard, one of my best friends and one of the first employees here at Webmail.us, just started blogging. I’ve known Ben since sixth grade when we used to walk back to his house after school to split a Diet Mountain Dew (he would always drink a full one himself after I left) and catch the latest episode of Duck Tales—those were the days!

Ben and I have been tight ever since. We’ve been through an awful lot together over the years—much of which will be unbloggable no matter how transparent this world gets. But fast forward to the present day and Ben is by far one of the most committed people we’ve got here at Webmail. He is my top operations guy and is responsible for holding the business together on a day to day basis. Most of our customers know Ben (and some of his teammates) as the face of our company. On any given day you can find him in sales, accounts receivable and customer service, always going the extra mile for the company and our customers.

Ben came on board with us more than three years ago… when we left Northern Virginia last year for Blacksburg, VA (a small town he had only visited a couple of times) Ben picked up and moved with us. I can’t say enough for his level of commitment to me and this company—and for that, I am most appreciative.

I explained a couple of weeks ago why I love my job so much. Ben does the same thing on his blog. Go here to read his story and here to subscribe to his blog. And if you like soccer and love to read, check out some Soccer, Soccer—you’ll get the best of both worlds there.

Forrester Research: Less Than 2% of Internet Users Use RSS

A new research report from Forrester says that:

Only 2% of all online households were “using RSS.” Now here’s the caveat -- that doesn’t include all the people who may be using RSS (for example, through My Yahoo!) and don’t realize it.

I’m glad they included the caveat. To be honest, I’m surprised that number was as high as 2%. If they asked those same users if they used HTML (the web) or POP3 (email), do you think those numbers would be any different?

Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing this out to me.

Survey Results Show Most Americans Have No Clue About RSS

One of my colleagues pointed me to an article on SearchEngineWatch.com that highlights a new data brief from the Pew Internet & American Life project titled: The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term “phishing” means, looks at the results of a just completed survey.

I'm not shocked at all.

My Thoughts on Microsoft and RSS...

We’re very close to the public release of the RSS reader that integrates with our webmail interface (we’ll make a series of announcements soon through my blog and our company one – and yes Mr. Rubel, we’ll do a press release too). But naturally, Microsoft’s announcement that they’re going to support RSS in the next version of their operating system, dubbed Longhorn, has spurred all types of questions from customers, employees and investors. I’m not sure why, but my first reaction was to shoot back one-off emails to give my take on the matter – how old school, right? I know, so here goes…

First of all, nothing Microsoft ever does should be shrugged off. With RSS in particular, I believe their adoption of RSS will have huge implications. More than anything, it’s going to bring RSS to the mainstream. Microsoft has a unique ability to not just educate the market, but to put whatever they want within a mouse-click of millions of users worldwide.

One of my developers made the comment:

Pat, this might cut down on the effectiveness of our RSS reader if we don’t make it spiffy enough. Cause you know the one built into Windows will be.

Of course, we’ll always have to advance everything we build - no doubt about that - regardless of Microsoft (technology in general is ultra-competitive). But, I don’t see this as a direct threat to our implementation of RSS. Here is why... first of all, we’re not an RSS company and we’re not building stand-alone RSS readers; that isn’t our business model and it never will be (I do think some of the RSS-focused companies will be hurt, but not all of them. I know from experience that focusing on a core niche can separate you from the pack – if it’s the right focus, the right niche, etc.) Plus, it *sounds* like Microsoft is pretty focused on RSS-enabling more types of content more so than trying to replace every company that has RSS aggregation capabilities baked into a product or service offering. Sure, they’ll provide RSS aggregation capabilities within Internet Explorer, but so what? The Firefox browser has already started doing this and so has the Thunderbird email client (I think Apple’s browser does too). Different people will want to get RSS-enabled data in different ways. It seems to me like building an RSS reader into Internet Explorer is a natural step for Microsoft, one I’m sure most RSS fanatics knew was coming.

Additionally, it’s important to keep our target customer in mind. Everything we build is tailored to the SMB (small and medium-sized business) market segment. We’re building applications that change the way businesses manage email and we believe very much in the convergence of email and RSS. Our reader will have administrative capabilities like the ability for email administrators to regulate RSS feed subscriptions and pre-subscribe feeds for their users. That way an employee like my mom could be subscribed to an industry specific RSS feed (or my blog!) without ever knowing that it has anything to do with RSS, just like she doesn’t know she uses POP3 and SMTP to send and receive email or that a dual scanning anti-virus engine keeps viruses and worms off of her computer. Its there and it works – that’s what small businesses need. My mom will be able to read my blog every day but she won’t go tell her friends how cool RSS is.

In my opinion, Microsoft will help the RSS cause in a major way. They will RSS-enable more of the everyday applications most people already use, they will educate the market and before long, more decision makers, influencers and users will realize the power of RSS – all of the above will be great for the industry and companies positioned to take advantage of that growing demand. All we’re going to do is integrate RSS aggregation capabilities into our email hosting platform (for now at least) – again, as I’ve mentioned before, I believe a lot in the convergence of email and RSS, just like Microsoft believes in the convergence of the operating system and RSS. It seems like the more things that are RSS-enabled, the more important it is to integrate RSS aggregation capabilities with core services (like email and calendaring). Needless to say, it should be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

Nick Bradbury, the founder of FeedDemon (recently acquired by Newsgator) has a really good post on Microsoft’s foray into RSS. He knows way more than I do about the RSS landscape, so if you’re interested, I recommend checking him out.

For more information about Microsoft’s plans for RSS, go here for a great read.

Encouraging Developers to Blog

We decided to take our company blogging strategy to the next level… we’re asking (encouraging I should say) our software developers to post information to our company blog. In fact, we’re really opening it up to everyone on the product and support side of our business. We started our blog a few months ago and we’ve seen decent results. But as we’ve grown, one of biggest challenges has been communication, on all levels. In particular, it’s been a challenge to keep our customers informed as we make tweaks our system, fix software bugs, make enhancements and release new products and services into the marketplace. Heck, its hard to communicate everything internally much less get it out to the rest of the world. Even with Kirk blogging all the time, information wasn’t always getting to him in a timely fashion… so we made the decision: let the people actually making the changes blog about them. This way, everyone in the company will find out what’s going on and so too will our current and prospective customers. Plus, it provides them with the ability to be heard. We want our blog to really open the doors and give everyone a peek into the Webmail.us culture. We want our blog to have personality (and there are some personalities in this company, let me tell you). We’re really aiming for transparency here and I’m confident this is a huge step in the right direction.

If you’re a customer or want to learn more about our company, I highly encourage you to subscribe to our blog.

All CEOs Should Blog

I subscribed to Paul Allen's blog the other day; he has a great post on why he believes all CEOs should blog.

A lot of people joke about how much I blog - I've probably had a couple of dozen people say things like, "I wish I had that much time on my hands." I probably have less time on my hands than most everyone else, but I make the time regardless. I think it’s that important.

Anyway, Paul gets it and sums it up well. Read on if you're interested.

The Long Tail of Journalism

I recently started following a blog written by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. I read him primarily for his thoughts and references to The Long Tail, a term he apparently coined last year... and one that I'm trying to learn as much about as possible. In this post, Chris points to: Six reasons why he prefers good blogs to most traditional journalism in the niche domains where his interests are greatest. They are:

1. They respect their readers enough to open their comments.

2. When they make mistakes, they tend to correct them.

3. They understand that every factual statement that can be linked to its source should be.

4. Because they have little default institutional authority, they go overboard backing up what they say with evidence. Unsourced assertions are frowned on. In this way, paradoxically enough, blogs are often more rigorous than traditional journalism, because they have to earn their readers' trust, not just assume it.

5. They're often written by practitioners, not just observers, and as a result they tend to get the details right.

6. If their information source is some random, unverified bar conversation or even just their own opinion, they're usually big enough to admit it.

I post this because a) I agree with it wholeheartedly, and b) I think its kind of neat to see a traditional journalist giving blogs their due credit.

I would build upon his #5 above. Since I've started reading blogs, I've learned an unbelievable amount from CEOs, CXOs, technologists, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and business people all over the world... people who are experts in their own right. This isn't to say anything bad about analysts, reporters, journalists, etc. I just think that practioners bring something valuable to the table, something I happen to value quite highly.

Whose blog am I reading anyway?

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Manny, my good friend and creative director, to have a look at the design of my blog. Design wise, you don't have too much flexibility with Typepad, but regardless, he was able to point out a couple of pretty big design flaws (imagine that) that I've since corrected. The biggest, and one that now frustrates me when I look at other blogs, was the lack of my name and title at the top of my blog. Now, I realize that blogs are not supposed to be commercials for yourself or your business, but at the end of the day I like to know whose blog I’m reading.

I bring this up because this is one of those quiet days in the office where I’m going from blog to blog, deciding which ones to subscribe to. Being a relatively lazy person when it comes to searching for what I’m looking for on a particular web site, it just seems logical that everyone would do this. Is there a reason for not putting your name and company at the top of your blog?