Going Digital, Going Social

I recently attended a smallish conference in Scottsdale, AZ, hosted by MarketingProfs, called the Digital Marketing Mixer. Now, granted, this event has little to do with the System Center business directly, but it does have a bearing on the ways in which we choose to engage our audience (that's you) in talking about System Center.

The main point of the event was to bring marketers up to speed on some of the latest trends in marketing (you know, the stuff we do to get you on board w/ our brand and hopefully, somewhere down the line, actually buy or convince others to buy our products to solve your problems in IT). My interest was in the social media track, which treated things like Twitter, blogging, videocasting, and the like. Overall, the sessions were light on some of the detail and analysis I might want, but to some extent, that's a measure of the newness of the discipline. Much of the value was in the open discussions among the attendees, where people would share their problems and best practices, and generally try to get a better sense of what this was all about.

Anyway, there's much more I could say about it, but I mainly just want to let you know how we're taking a look at new ways to engage w/ you--as our increasing emphasis on our informal videos on TechNet Edge might attest--and hope you'll join with us in a conversation about that. A few questions I'd love to delve into with you:

• As an IT pro or IT manager/decision maker, do you use social media tools such as Twitter to get your job done, and if so, which ones?
• Are there enough of you interested in using social media tools to justify our investing in them and putting more energy into engaging with you through them?

My feeling is that this is the stuff of the future, and what little I know about IT pros suggests to me that this is an obvious way for us to go, in part because this is much less about focus group-tested messages and in-your-face marketing on the Web and in print, and much more so about building personal/professional connections with our audience. I'm shown again and again that you just want the facts, man, including better resources to help you get your job done and the most out of, e.g., System Center, and without any distracting nonsense to try to "sell" you on anything.

Am I right?

As you ponder those questions, check out this System Center tweets feed. And, give us a hand and do some TechNet bookmarking out there--just be sure to do use the "system center" tag. Your items will show up in our TechCenter very soon (we've got a few community-focused revisions in the works).

- dave //