Lauren Cooney's Reality Check

Fighting the Good Fight (for the Community)

I love this term. Yes, it tends to be overused and sometimes misused, but essentially for me, it means one thing: doing what’s best for developer communities. I’m not talking just about the Microsoft developer community, but the community as a whole – all developers with lots of different programming backgrounds – from HTML and CCS to PHP, ASP.NET to Java – and more. And usually I find that if we can do what’s right for the community, it’s a win-win for both organizations and communities out there.

At Microsoft I find it’s sometimes a mixed bag. The terminology that I use is that we’re a huge ship – and it takes awhile to get people in line to move that ship in the right direction. Cal Evans outlined this beautifully in a blog entry recently – and I think he gives a fair assessment of where we’re at and some of the things we could do to improve. 

That said, our teams that are driving the Microsoft Web Platform are really working to nail this. We started out with a vision – a very simple statement with lots of work that goes on behind the scenes.

 

 

It’s been 10 months since we kicked off this effort, but we have seen some amazing results to date, including:

- The introduction of the Web Platform Installer (WebPI), which streamlines the download/install process of our web stack (no more 10 websites to visit – only one!)

- The delivery of the Windows Web Application Gallery with the most popular open source applications out there – for installation on top of the Microsoft Web Platform (no more configuration pain!) – and, if you have an application you’d like to showcase – we’ll do it – marketing & distribution included :)

- The inclusion of PHP into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (we do listen, I promise)

And the community is responding – we’ve had over 1.5 million downloads of our products through the WebPI since January of this year (!!) and almost 150,000 applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery downloaded since March 17th.

But let me get to the point that I’m trying to make here about the success of what we’ve done:

With greater success comes greater responsibility. And we want to deliver to you a better, more interoperable community-driven platform going forward.

What does this mean? Well, for starters it means that we’re going to be looking into the broader community to create guidance around certain things – such as OpenID (yes Chris Messina, we’re getting there) and other standards-based efforts. We’re also going to be continuing to work closely with the PHP community on different things we could do better for PHP developers working on Windows. We also want to include various tooling options that help developers build web projects faster and better – even if these don’t come from our own engineering teams.

That said though, as my team embarks on planning out our next steps – we need your help. What do you want to see? How would you like to participate?

Some of the things we’re looking for specifically are:

- Feedback on the WebPI: What’s missing? What would you like to see included?

- Feedback on the Windows Web App Gallery: What apps would you like to see? Could we improve this experience?

- On the Microsoft Web Platform as a whole: how can we make this better? What products do you want to see better integrated? We’re planning on integrating more with Azure, but are there other products out there we could provide guidance for and/or include?

- Guidance: What tutorials would you like to see?

So the action item here? Let us know what you want to see. We’ve been pushing hard to make this happen internally at Microsoft, but the community feedback is absolutely critical for us to take the next steps to make this a true community platform.

So on that note – you know how to get a hold of me – lcooney@microsoft.com or www.twitter.com/lcooney – or even better, let’s discuss here on my blog. We’re open for business. /LC

 

(photo credit: Jim Grisanzio, Sun Microsystems) http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimgris/542408040/

Tips and Tricks for Building your Personal Brand: An Insider’s Perspective

Last week I presented to Women@Microsoft, a group of about 100 or so women that hold monthly meetings down at the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley. It was an awesome group, and I thought I’d post the presentation here.

As a side note – I got called from one of the General Managers at Microsoft to take this job almost based entirely on my blog and also on my twitter account… so you never know what can come from something as simple as building your own personal brand. :)

 

Brand-ology:Tips and Tricks for Personal Branding

View more presentations from laurencooney.

Brand-ology: Tips & Tricks on Branding Yourself from a Chick who Lives It!

Building your own personal brand used to be about a logo, or a tagline. Today it’s changed – now it’s about the picture you have posted on your Facebook account, or the Tweets you send via Twitter during your workday (and sometimes in your off-hours!). Can something this simple make you successful – personally and professionally? How do you build your own personal brand both internally and externally through these Web 2.0 communities? Thought you’d never start a blog? Well, time to think again.

Lauren Cooney will be discussing her adventures on Facebook, Twitter, in blogging, and also in building her internal and external brand at Microsoft. Come prepared for some great (and easy) tips you can use to build out your network, some laughable stories that you can learn from, and great takeaways and suggestions for building your own personal brand.

I need some design help! Any takers? Rewards offered!

I've decided that I need to get a cool new blog now that I'm at Microsoft and I hang out with all these Silverlight and Expression designer folks. Not only that, every time I pull up my blog, it makes me not want to blog because of how truly drab it seems... and I think it needs a little pick me up, especially given all the news I'm going to be talking about over the next few months (very, very exciting stuff, I promise you all)!

Would anyone want to take a stab at helping to design a cool new blog for me? I'm sure I could figure out an Amazon gift card or something in exchange... and of course, your work will get properly promoted all over this blog as well as my wonderful Twitter account (laurencooney).

So, any takers? Please feel free to ping me directly too - lcooney@microsoft.com. I am open to anything. :) Oh, and by the way, it's not a prerequisite to build it with MSFT technologies. Any cool design ideas will do.

Thanks! /LC

The scoop on my new gig at Microsoft... and why I made the leap

Last weekend I packed up my house in SF, shipped my cats (who almost were lost, but that's another story for another day), filled a few suitcases full of clothes, and hopped a plane to Seattle! It's been an exciting adventure so far, full of new faces at Microsoft, and lots of new and fun challenges to face.

For those of you who are interested, I'm now working in the Application Platform and Developer Division at Microsoft, running the Web Platform team. My team (who I'll snap pictures of this week and introduce you to) is responsible for Internet Explorer and ASP.NET product management, Web 2.0, Web Influencer engagement, developer Open Source efforts, and standards engagement. It's an amazingly smart team with lots of enthusiasm, and it's just great to be working with people who truly have a passion for the community, and just "get it." It's been awhile since I've been in an environment where folks truly care about the people that use their software, and it just rocks. And, not being on a team that looks at revenue for a success metric is also amazing.

When I chose to go to Microsoft, there were a few key things that helped convince me to make the jump:

(1) When I was interviewing, I made it very clear that I care about the community first, and the company second. Every single person I talked to (from VPs like Dan'l Lewin and GMs like Sheila Gulati, right down to the business manager in the office, I kid you not) understood that this was critical to success. And that while other divisions might care about revenues or competition, our key job is ensuring that developers are successful, regardless of the circumstances or products they are developing on. And thus far, I've seen that message delivered to our team. This is something that has always been of number one importance to me, and I'm committed to keeping our teams focused on this moving forward.

(2) The acceptance of the vision of Microsoft as a more open company was crystal clear as something that has to be done both internally and externally at Microsoft. It's always been a principle at Microsoft to give transparency to what we do, but now, we're fully committed to being a more open company (as can be seen here). I sat down with Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner, and Brian Goldfarb just this week (Sam who I worked with at BEA, and Robert who I worked with at both BEA and IBM; Brian's my new boss) and we have some good ideas of where we need to go and what we need to do to get this done. Will this happen overnight? No. But the shift is happening, and I'm really excited about what we can do. There's so much opportunity here, it's just incredible. And people are committed to making it happen, and to see the change in that thought process is terrific. Please do send me thoughts and ideas, as always (lacooney@microsoft.com).

(3) Putting the fun back into the job. I've never seen a group of people that have more fun with their jobs than I have at Microsoft. There are lots of really bright folks over here, and no lack of great ideas flying around. This is one of the most important things I factor in when making a job leap. My first day, we actually had a team building activity (Whirly-ball) where I got to know folks from all over our division. The following day, we had a team offsite where I got the low-down on all of our teams' activities and what we're planning for the next year. And let me tell you - the level of enthusiasm throughout this offsite was great. And it's so nice to be back in an environment where this happens - all the time.

(4) Free drinks and coffee (wait, kidding, kidding). That's just a nice to have. :)

I'm excited and I can't wait to see what the coming year will bring. A lot's going to happen, and I hope that I can use my experience working with the Java, PHP, and OS Dev communities to help Microsoft build a better, honest, relationship with it's "non-traditional" developer base. But to do that, I do need to hear from you, so keep the feedback coming.

And get ready for an exciting year! /LC

PS: And to all you nay-sayers who said the weather would be awful in Seattle, it's been pretty damn nice out lately! I'm kind of glad the rental car they gave me was a convertible (my choice was either that, or a minivan... yeah).

Building a Successful User Community

About 2 weeks ago I attended the BIG (Bay Area Interactive Group) Holiday Party in San Francisco. They had a panel that included several professionals in the marketing field that discussed audience driven communities and focused specifically on community building, both in technical and non-technical industries. I thought it was pretty well done, and some interesting campaigns were discussed, including those around Volkswagon, Campbell's Soup, and a few others. BuzzLogic actually has an algorithm that will track the success of community, which I thought was pretty interesting. But the one thing that bothered me a bit was how much some of these folks were actually using the forum to pitch their companies' successes and services rather than actually discuss the "how" part of building the community.

I've spent about eight years now building and developing technical communities, both for BEA dev2dev and several Apache projects (Beehive, XMLBeans, Geronimo), and now I work in the CTO's Office focused on fostering relationships with early technical adopters and industry leaders in Web 2.0, as well as take part in some developerWorks initiatives. I think it's okay to pay an outside company to build some sort of infrastructure or website around the community itself that fosters a positive user experience and forum for feedback and collaboration, but I'm not a huge fan of hiring outside a company to find the influencers themselves.

Since there were a ton of folks at this event that asked me about how to build a successful user/influencer community and track success for this, here are a few quick pointers I thought I would share to those new to this area:

(1) Get inside the user's head. Familiarize yourself with the industry/product and know your stuff. Talk to the leaders in this area, and watch their blogs, read their articles, etc. Ask questions, and don't pretend you know something you don't. There's no shame in asking a question if you don't know.

(2) Talk to your "inside" guys. Who are the folks/devs at your company that built this product (esp. if it's a technical community)? Why did they develop certain features? What do they think is the coolest/most useful feature of the product, and why? Get the scoop from the people that know the product the best. Back when I was at BEA I spent hours upon hours just kicking back in developer's offices and discussing WLS and other products, and that time spent was invaluable.

(3) Be honest. Never try to sell a user or early adopter on the product if it doesn't have the features they don't want. Building community can't be about sales; it's about relationships. Get feedback from them, and never, never try to sugarcoat a product issue. Get this feedback from the users/early adopters and bring it to your development teams - and let your users know that you have done this. It's important to get user feedback to your product teams anyways, but also important that your user knows that you did. And be honest with your management; if there are major issues with the product, let them know. And also work with your team/management to figure out a feedback system that works and that's scalable. You don't want to be bringing issues to them at all times. Sometimes a monthly report can be useful for this type of information. And remember, all information is good information - both good and bad feedback is essential.

(4) Be a connector, not a barrier. Your job is to connect users to other users, and your developers with users, firsthand. An extra few hundred bucks to throw a dinner for users and your internal team members at a conference is a great idea, and Lunch 2.0s are a great thing to have. Work with your internal team to figure out the best way to make them available, directly, to the users - and make sure to streamline it to have it be easy for everyone. Whether it is through newsgroups, a feedback email alias (that folks actually respond to), user groups, a weekly email, or some other mechanism, this is necessary. And make sure you or someone from your team actually responds to these inquires. I'm a huge fan of free support (which most big companies unfortunately don't offer anymore), so trying to foster an environment that replaces/supplants support in some instances can be very valuable.

(5) Collaborative online environments are key. You need to have a website or online area that is user friendly, updated with new information often, and provides information in a way that's easy to access and easy to find. Don't have a website that's difficult to navigate - this will discourage users from even checking your product out. Make feedback easy through newsgroups and email aliases, and make sure your product guys are easily able to access this information as well. Don't bother with trying to collect leads from this site - providing a quick form where folks can give their email addresses will be enough. If you want to *try* to get more information from your users, most of them will just fill out the form with fake names and companies, and it tends to be a waste of time to sort through the fake names and the real ones anyways - plus, fewer folks will sign up to receive information. Obviously with Web 2.0 this is getting much easier as well. This is one area where I can see companies spending money. If you can't create this infrastructure inside your company, then outsource it. This online area is a must.

My 2 cents for now. Some folks that I think have done a great job on this front are O'Reilly, Floyd Marinescu (TheServerSide and InfoQ), and the guys from JBoss. Adding an online personality (not boring) to the mix (a la Marc Fleury) definitely will give you some good PR too, whether you love them or hate them. Because remember, WE LOVE YOU. :)

/LC