Me - Talking, as usual

Microsoft is changing from the inside. I see it every day -- and from my 12-years here, will say that this morph is different than the one where we jumped into the Internet with IE. A handful of us MS marketers are careening off the beaten path into some new areas. Many frown or roll their eyes when they see what we are doing, but we know it’s just from people haven’t “gotten it” yet – they will.  This is the behind-the-scenes look at how we are building this WebX.0 marketing (campaign?) --er, conversation.

The story behind the Hugh MacLeod project
We started on this off-path marketing project after we noticed the Steve Clayton, UK Microsoft Blogger, was generating a lot of conversation with Hugh’s Blue Monster illustration. It got us to analyze what was happening (of course, most people here are highly analytical so that was a necessary step – myself, I am not analytical but fully understood the power of Hugh’s blue monster). The reality was that Hugh was writing about what really is --- what people really think. We (and marketers in general) need to change our one-way approach to marketing and acknowledge the real world. Why? Is everyone just smarter now? Maybe, but more importantly, people now expect and want to know the story behind the words.   

So, first off, what are we trying to achieve? Like everything on the web: Relevance in this web X.0 space. Many don’t realize that we have some really solid products (and Expression is just the start) to help web developers, web builders, web agencies out.  And, unbeknownst to almost everyone, our APIs are being made available which is really helping some companies create some cool innovations quickly through some of our mash-ups (I know you'll see more on mashups soon if not already). 

Many web builders are using open source LAMP stack today. As is (sigh) often the case, Microsoft comes late to the game (not intentionally I might add, it just takes a little time to steer the ship. Steve Ballmer pushes for more agility all the time and I think he’ll crack that one sometime soon especially with Ray Ozzie on board). But when we come to the game, we realize that we need to add more value than what is out there, so the products team build what they think will save more time, or be more effective than that is currently avaialble. I personally, feel that Office Live does many of those quite well today.

Well, in this space, we’re not going to establish relevance with dinosaurs or dancing office workers. So, we came to embrace the phenomenon of transparency, sharing ideas, contributions. (which, by the way, is why we are offering $1,000 cash at the show to the best idea on where we should invest our $500,000 in Web developers next year). If you’re at the Web 2.0 Expo you can stop by our booth a submit your idea. I’m pretty sure we’re going to get something good and my buddy and co-worker, Heidi Skupien Bretz, is TRULY enabled to make that idea happen. (And, I think it might even be more than $500,000 that we spend on this enablement project, but let’s just start there).