Comments on: Trend: Community Vendors Who Eat Their Own Dogfood

By: Bryan Person, LiveWorld

Bryan Person, LiveWorld — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:05:51 +0000

Dawn:

Great post here, and you’re absolutely right about the importance of walking the talk as a community vendor.

Here’s how we do that at LiveWorld: Our SocialVoice community (http://socialvoice.liveworld.com/) is a public example of our standard Community Center platform that our clients (big brands, typically) use. We have and will continue to encourage existing and potential future customers testdrive our platform by participating in SocialVoice themselves. They can create their own blog and profile, share photos, upload videos, join in forum discussions, add comments to blog posts, etc. In short, they can get a real sense of how our platform works.

SocialVoice is also a reflection of LiveWorld’s approach to community, and we think that shines through in particular in the voices of our bloggers. More than a dozen LiveWorld staffers are now blogging regularly about professional *and* personal topics. So we cover trends in community/social networking, but we also write about gardening, traveling, parenting, and fantasy football (those posts seem to generate the most comments!).

Enjoying your blog, Dawn. Thanks for continuing to raise these important issues and for keeping the vendors on their toes!

Bryan Person | @BryanPerson
LiveWorld social media evangelist

By: Dawn

Dawn — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:58:31 +0000

Hi Daniel,

Good point. I am actually a big fan of what Atlassian has done with their community and in support of open source projects. I’ve spent quite a bit of time using JIRA, too.

Definitely a good example of dog-fooding.

By: Daniel Freeman

Daniel Freeman — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:10:54 +0000

Great post Dawn! Couldn’t agree more about the importance of using your own product. I work at Atlassian and you might also want to consider listing us as an example of dog-fooding.
We have a public instance of our wiki, confluence.atlassian.com, as a knowledgebase and platform to collaborate with our community. We also a public instance of our issue tracker, jira.atlassian.com, to make public all known issues for our products and let our customers vote on what they want us to work on.
Getting the community involved is important for us too as we have given away hundreds of licenses to Open Source communities for their public instances, http://www.atlassian.com/opensource/

By: Dawn

Dawn — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:35:14 +0000

Marcus, Thanks for the link.

Dan,

Thanks. Maybe I’ll have to start using “sipping our own champagne” or “imbibing our home brew”

By: Dan Ziman

Dan Ziman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:17:17 +0000

Hey Dawn:
I’d prefer to say “sipping our own champagne” over “eating our own dog food”. If that’s a bit stuffy, then maybe “imbibing our home brew” sounds more like it.

In any case, thanks for pointing out the examples and all around good community management advice.

By: Marcus Nelson

Marcus Nelson — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:26:06 +0000

Hi Dawn -
Agree that the best way to learn about your product is to use it, as well as monitoring what others are saying about you on Twitter & Google Alerts. Perhaps you might have seen an article that Jeremiah wrote about UserVoice and how we also, “eat our own dogfood.”
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/02/build-your-own-ideastorm-with-uservoice/

Check out our kibble: http://uservoice.uservoice.com

Thank you for the write up – great info.

Marcus
UserVoice