Monday I had an experience which demonstrated just how much marketing has changed with the advent of Web 2.0. Within a matter of a few hours I conducted a thorough software review using the actual product (Confluence 3.0) and received feedback from Atlassian. Now while our review (a team of folks from my company and other firms) ultimately found that Confluence did not have the micro-blogging features we wanted, Atlassian is to be greatly complimented for their marketing approach. While they may not have convinced my team that we wanted their micro-blogging product, they got us to take notice and put them on a "watch list". Let me explain ... here is how the process unfolded:
- Friday, July 10th: I learn about Confluence 3.0 and it's micro blogging feature
- Monday, July 13 @ 6:30 am: I review my schedule and decide to conduct a software review
- Monday, July 13 @ 6:45 am: After a few Google searches I discover the Confluence Sandbox. This software environment is "full use" and allows any user to just start using it (i.e. I did not need to process through 1,000,000 screens trying to gain access rights while being required to give Atlassian tons of private information)
- Monday, July 13 @ 6:50 am: I issue an invite via an internal communication tool and Twitter for folks to join me in an online evaluation. I make certain folks just post innocuous "hello world" comments, etc.
Okay ... this was an amazing process. In the past, I would have had to meet with some marketing folks from a given company who would force me to sit through a presentation, and then hopefully I would gain access rights within a few days to conduct an evaluation. Coordination of schedules would have pushed such a meeting way off into the future. My next step would have been to coordinate a demo with folks from my company ... another scheduling nightmare. This process took less than four hours and I even involved individuals from other companies in my test. This fact is most unusual if you to stop to consider it; my software test involved people from companies other than my own! Finally, at the end of our test I sent out a message to Atlassian via Twitter, and although I did not know any of their engineers, I had my response in under 30 minutes.
Thus, here is how to market software products in the world of Web 2.0:
- Give you customers full access to a complete working version of your product
- Don't require tons of personal data to obtain Sandbox access
- Have your team monitor social media to follow your customers efforts
Atlassian's Sandbox was configured in some other important ways which made me willing to try their software:
- Their system did not allow robots (i.e. is not indexed by search engines)
- I was forced to prove I was human for all posts (captcha)
- The system took email references and turned them into "non links".
While I'm disappointed that Confluence 3.0 does not have true micro-blogging, I am very impressed with how the process worked. Atlassian is to be commended. The end result is I am now following four Atlassian employees on Twitter (my Northstar Nerd tweets) and watching their product for the dot releases. Help me in this cause by voting for the addition of responses to one's status updates, which would allow for true conversations and threads.
