how do you spell s.c.o.b.l.e.

gapingvoid: london geek dinner- afterword

"the are seven layers of management between Bill Gates and Robert Scoble"

should have commented on this weeks ago, but have been swamped lately...

i've been able to spend some time w/ robert this spring at conferences and geek dinners, thus totally agree w/ hugh that robert is personally amazing as well as influencing certain aspects of microsoft's internal culture in a major way...

the number of actual developers of microsoft products who are blogging is huge, and robert should be credited w/ being the initial change agent for this, but so should every supervisor, manager, director, vp, group lead all the way up to steve and bill should be credited for recognizing the value and letting it develop as organically as it has...

but not all of microsoft's culture is aware that they have actually changed for the better, and that's not robert's fault - after all he is an external evangelist, who is effecting internal folks via osmosis - mostly those either of the technical persuasion or from their home campus in redmond...

however, there is a large percentage of microsoft employees that doesn't have a clue who robert scoble is - hence the title of this post...

in my many interactions w/ the part of microsoft tasked w/ supporting it's customers: the sales folks, the technical analysts and the marketing folks - when i bring up robert and the good work he's doing, actually praising him for doing his part to change the public perception of microsoft from "the borg" to what is now thought of as a softer more transparent company - i'm commonly met w/ "scoble huh, how do you spell that?"

so, yes robert is doing a great job, but the folks that meet w/ their customers most still need the koolaid - that should be one of steve and the rest of microsoft's senior management group's highest priority, getting the blogging, wiki, collaboration and transparency tools (of course educate them on the right ways to use them) into the folks that interact the most w/ the customers...

as for microsoft and podcasting, i spoke to robert about this, but of course he's swapped too - someone from microsoft should be actively participating in the pswg :)

Comments

[david parmet]

I've met people at MS's PR agency who have no idea who Robert is or what he does. You think they would know since he's the one lighting a fire under their you know whats.