MACROMEDIA CASE STUDY (Cont.)

"How can we improve trace" Example

This link: http://www.markme.com/flashteam/archives/007357.cfm illustrates how blogs have helped Macromedia and their clients improve features within a Macromedia product. A blog article asking for feedback on a Macromedia product feature was posted on a blog on March 29th and over a six-week period customers and Macromedia employees posted 90 comments. A real discussion ensued with customers giving suggestions and their thoughts about possible changes or even if they did not want any changes. In the process Macromedia gained a lot of valuable insight into the development of this section of the application and empowered customers to help build a better product.

Conclusions

Blogging has completely changed the way in which Macromedia conducts its software development process. Before blogs, Macromedia would not release any product information until 2-3 weeks before the release day. This was how the software industry worked. Software development was a relatively closed process, some feedback was gathered from customers, but a lot of the work was completed inside a company.

Macromedia slowly realized there were big benefits, and manageable risks to opening up the process of product development to their customer community.

Internal blogs helped to evangelize the idea of using blogs to encourage feedback and suggestions from customers in an open way. Slowly through trial and error Macromedia determined how best to make the process work. As yet there have been no major issues, and the whole process of using blogs to communicate with customers for the development of new products has been a huge success. That success has come in terms of better products, more committed customers, more sales and positive PR results.

One of the biggest benefits to Macromedia has come from the increased number of search engine higher rankings. The blog posts of 50-60 Macromedia blogs has meant the company has more content on the web, and because the posts are valuable to Macromedia customers the company's blogs are receiving links from customers. Chambers explained, "weblogs will appear first on search engines, even before our site, because of conversations, we were getting linked." One of the factors determining the ranking of a web page in a search engine are the number of sites linking to a web page. Through online conversations and discussion Macromedia's blogs are getting a lot of links, which in turn is giving Macromedia higher rankings and producing more traffic from search engines.