Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate
When Macromedia released new versions of four of its applications, it expected that its customers would have lots of questions about how to use the new stuff, said Tom Hale, the company’s vice president in charge of developer relations.
Macromedia had five of its “community managers” create their own weblogs using Radio and Blogger, two of the most popular blog publishers. (The bloggers are John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Vernon Viehe and Bob Tartar.)
The blogs would provide a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions. Most importantly, the community managers would write like bloggers, with that casual, this-great-idea-just-occurred-to-me tone which sometimes makes weblogs so addictive.
“Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea,” Hale said. “Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn’t be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs—they like the format.”