We have been getting a little frustrated at work with some of the communications mechanisms we have for alerting our business partners about upcoming enablement we have on offer. Sometimes the right people just aren’t getting the information they need in a timely enough manner. The new anti-spam laws make it very difficult to do business communications “correctly” too, for fear of stepping over the line (although the fact that these people are part of the IBM business partner program would, to me, prove a pre-existing business relationship, and thus email commuication would not be deemed spam, but it’s really all too hard).
So anyway, I prefer not to email bomb people anyway – I spent most of my time dealing with internal “spam” from IBM, let alone dealing with emails from external organisations as well, so I don’t want to inflict more potentially unwanted email on other people. But at the same time, we want to get the word out there quickly and effectively.
What better way to do that then with a blog ?
I got my partner-in-crime at work, Matt, to agree that this would be a good way of us supporting our Lotus Business Partners, with a resource they can check at their leisure, or use the RSS feed to facilitate easy monitoring of the information we post there.
And so, The Lotus Channel was born (actually, it happened last Friday while I was waiting to catch a plane home from Brisbane. Took about an hour to choose a domain name (after about 6 weeks of brainstorming *sigh*), register it, set up the hosting site, set up a new database, download a copy of WordPress, and then install it. Then it took about 36 hours for the domain name to propogate through to our local DNS servers, and a further 48 hours to finish up the look-and-feel for the site. I’m pretty impressed with my efforts there actually :D
The site is designed for the business partners we work with on a daily basis, we will be posting product news and other interesting stuff we find that might be useful to them. We will also be announcing classes or seminars that we will be running so that they can chase up their internal systems for making sure they get enrolled in time.
We hope that by making sure the people who need the information can find it, then we will get better attendences at some of our events, and fewer “I didn’t find out about it until the last minute” complaints.
As a result, I probably won’t be posting all that much work stuff here anymore – except maybe commentary or gratuitous whinging when I’m feeling ticked off :D
tnx lotus