How the Buzz team is listening and engaging in the conversation. Great Example
Below is an interesting conversation between some of the big time A listed users of Buzz talking about the speed of changes in the application and the expectations of these top Buzz community users. It is very interesting and then Bradley Horowitz VP of Google jumps into the conversation and let's everyone know what is happening. This a great example of understanding your community and engaging. Interesting is how Louis Gray is an advocate for Google in this conversation. He has the respect and trust that Google would not even have to enter the conversation and most of these folks would take what Louis is talking about as fact.
How many companies can say the same about their community and their engagement in it? Do you know where your community is and how they talk with each other? Is your companies culture ready to engage without your legal, communications, marketing, customer service departments having to have a conference over how to answer a question that is asked, or over an opinion expressed?
There is a business case study here that someone needs to do .... Any takers?
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Thomas Hawk - Buzz
- PublicPart of the idea of a perpetual beta is that things are improved very quickly. Maybe I'm expecting more than I should. But Buzz feels like it needs to be innovating faster than it is. With the perpetual beta, weeks should feel like dog years. Days should feel like months. Easy for me to say, right? Things like the annoying mute box shouldn't take a week to fix. They should take hours or a few...Expand this post »
5 people liked this - Louis Gray, Mike Doeff, Thomas Morffew and 2 others
Mark Cadwaladr - Reading http://www.google.com/buzz/louisgray/KG2L2rXUDKH/Designing-Buzz-for-a-Google-Free-World yesterday I'm inclined to allow the slow pace. Sure, stuff annoys me at the moment but I reckon my chagrin will be all but a fading memory in a few months and Buzz a whole lot more feature-rich. If anything at the moment I'm got enough on my plate working out how to get most value out of the combination of Buzz/Gmail/Reader/Twitter et al to worry too much.Tell ya what though, despite starting to read your tech-focused posts a good while back - linked from Scoble, who else - its only now using the excellent Buzz feature that I'm now seeing, appreciating and sharing your awesome photography. Thank you. Maybe it's me but I've never really gone out there looking at flickr etc but in here I'm seeing great stuff whilst reading articles without having to go elsewhere. Lazy me.6:54 pm
Rodney Mitchell - Exactly what I've been thinking. They've been good at the "we hear you" and "yes, we're going to fix that _very soon_" but, uh, where are the fixes?7:01 pm
Louis Gray - Solving issues at scale is hard. I think you and I got spoiled by the speed of FriendFeed's iterations. I would love it if Buzz kept improving at a quicker pace, but everything I've heard (and seen) is that this team has been going full-bore since launch.7:05 pm
Thomas Hawk - Mark, thanks, buzz does do photography well. Still here there are things that could be improved. (Why won't it feed in your last five photos of a flickr or picasa batch upload for instance). I just think that you get a lot of traction and momentum when you ship early. It's hard to compare FriendFeed and Buzz in some ways, but on a percentage basis FF had pretty awesome growth. I think in part that was because of the excitement of seeing things constantly getting better and better and the momentum that this provided for their earliest users. Part of what starts making you worry is that if you feel like not much has been done to improve some of the siginificant problems in the first few weeks then it makes you start questioning whether or not you really can expect much more in 2 months.7:06 pm
Thomas Hawk - haha, funny, Louis. I just was posting about the FF experience and you replied addressing that. You must be reading my mind. Q. Is Buzz bigger than FF was? It doesn't feel like it necessarily is to me. Is there a way to measure what the unique users are like we could look at FF on compete.com or something?7:07 pm
Louis Gray - Because Buzz is embedded (er... buried) in GMail, I think that would be hard to track. For instance, this URL is https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#buzz, where I am seeing your updates. Similarly, it has often been tough to track activity to Reader, as it is both a directory and a subdomain.7:15 pm
Hector Martinez - Have you tried submitting these issues and voting on them at the feedback app? Seems like they have ignored all of the bitching from the last couple weeks and are starting with that. Buzz has seen more stalls than Health Care and The World Trade Center rebuild combined.7:21 pm
Thomas Hawk - Hector, in part it's less even about my issues being fixed as much as it's about the fact that issues are being fixed. I think it's important that people feel momentum with buzz's development.7:29 pm
Bradley Horowitz - Thomas - we understand your sentiment. Due to the scale of Gmail and its focus on reliability, you'll see us push changes out in a principled way that'll be measured in weeks. In these pushes you'll see a number of improvements and changes batched up - trust that there is more activity going on than will be moment-to-moment visible. It'll show up soon. And we agree - we're working hard on shortening this cycle.8:10 pm
Thomas Hawk - Bradley, fair enough, thanks for the answer and glad to hear that we'll see batches of improvements. :) The feedback is great to hear on buzz. Just think of me as your three year old in the back seat of the car asking are we there yet over and over and over and over again. ;)8:36 pm
