Chris at the Social Customer Manifesto has a brilliant post on how Sun has made the infamous “product pages” that any company website has a little less stupid.
Ever since I read Naked Conversations I started looking real close to Sun as one of the few companies that are fully engaged in the conversation (Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, is an active blogger himself as well as thousands of his employees), but this fell under my radar.
Basically they link on the product page to a variety of post, coming either from the internal blogging system but also from external sources.
With Chris’ words:
The kneejerk reaction is “why on EARTH” would Sun link from its site to a customer site that contains paragraphs like:
“I want X4100’s, NOT M2 BULLSHIT. I want lots of them and I want them quickly. I want a SunSolve worth paying for. I want a docs.sun.com that has been updated and more easily navigated than what we had 5 years ago. And most of all, I don’t want to keep hearing that Dell doesn’t have these problems!!!”
Why would Sun link there? Because that’s where the conversation is happening, and it’s where the “live web” part of the customer experience is being documented, in real time, by a passionate customer.
I totally agree. There’s no place to hide anymore. You have no other choice than embrace the conversation and ride it.
Uh, and just in case you’re wondering, the disgruntled customer above end up praising Sun for helping him solving his problem. There’s no ad agency in the world that can provide a commercial better than that.
[...] trust somebody speaking while hiding in the shadows as well. That’s the reason why I like what Sun is doing (and even Microsoft is not that far behind), because they talk with users by putting their name and [...]
Pingback by The blogosphere gets mad at UK Olympic Logo « Talkmarks — June 8, 2007 @ 10:01 pm
very interesting. i’m adding in RSS Reader
Comment by Melina — December 20, 2007 @ 6:12 pm