Scott Hanselman did a great talk today at the Community Leadership summit (#techedcls) about how the community can leverage their voice online. He encouraged the community to leverage their voice via blogs to get the attention of Microsoft to fix things which they feel can be done in a better way. A great call to action to the community to make their voice heard. User group leaders have a distinct advantage here, nay responsibility, to make sure their community members voices are heard, and Scott’s suggestion to people to blog is a good one. Each user group leader can take advantage of this and be the channel to voice their member concerns, which ultimately would cause organizations like Microsoft to take action on their request.
Improvement Needed
However, good intentioned this is (and I urge leaders and community members to make their voice heard), it speaks a lot about the way Microsoft gets or takes feedback from the community. For e.g. Microsoft Connect is one of the ways they do this. However, a much larger, open, consistent and better promoted way is needed to enable this. My first pet peeve about Microsoft Connect is that it needs a serious upgrade, not just the website, but also the way it’s promoted to the community. Heck I’m sure not all the people in the audience had even heard about Microsoft Connect or have actively participated in this. This is a structural fault in the program, considering that this audience of community leaders who were attending the session are at the forefront on Microsoft Community activities.
Solutions?
1. Revamp the site.
2. Make the site more social friendly, enabling people to share on Twitter, FB etc. Well maybe not the entire site, but partial integration might be the way to go forward.
3. Get a community advisory board in place, which provides feedback to the Microsoft Connect team to improve the Connect site.
4. Involve the community associations, INETA, GITCA, PASS, to promote the channel and reward them for doing so.
The buck stops at you…
The real deal which Scott talked about in his session was; if we’re concerned about something which affects us, for e.g. this post of mine where I highlight the Microsoft Connect issue, then do something about it. For starters blog about it and spread the word among the community. You can do the same about other things which you feel need improvement. However, there is a caveat, make sure it’s not just a rant, make sure you spell the problem clearly, and provide solutions which will help.
