MACROMEDIA CASE STUDY (Cont.)

Brand and Transparency

Macromedia has worked hard to open up its software development process over the last few years, and in the process they have been given a great gift from their customers in terms of commitment and partnership to build better products.

Macromedia's blog strategy is not to develop a lot of blogs, they think it is more worthwhile to develop a few blogs with quality content rather than develop a lot of blogs with hardly any content. Macromedia has about 50-60 blogs at the moment. They could have a lot more people blog at the company, however Macromedia's blog strategy is only to add content that will bring value to their customers. While Macromedia encourages its people to give enough personal information so that customers have a sense of the Macromedia employee, they do ask that bloggers focus on the theme or product at hand for content.

The blogging strategy has been a great success for Macromedia, helping to build a stronger brand with customers by using the techniques of openness and transparency with blogs.

Macromedia wanted to go one step further with the idea of blogging, and to that purpose they have started to aggregate non-Macromedia employee blogs in a blog aggregator website. All 50-60 Macromedia blogs are in the site, and also over 440 non-Macromedia blogs are aggregated within the site.

Macromedia XML News Aggregator
http://weblogs.macromedia.com

The Macromedia blogging community had grown so large; Macromedia wanted to build an aggregator blog that would help customers and employees at Macromedia filter through all of the data out there on the Macromedia related blogs. Customers have to request to be included in the blog aggregator; Macromedia reviews the blog, checking to determine the content is truly relevant for their community. The site has been so successful there is currently a backlog of 50 or so blogs waiting to be reviewed.

Chambers said, "we wanted to 'bring the community even closer', there's a lot of different reasons for creating the aggregator, no one easy way to keep up with all of the different Macromedia related blogs. What we wanted to do was bring the conversation to one place. We wanted good and bad comments. In so doing the site has proven to be a great resource, tracking the hot topics." The News Aggregator has been a good success, traffic has really taken off and information is now easier to find. Macromedia is even adding non-English blogs.