The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

If you get a good social media and build up your presence with something like the Spiceworks community forums you will find people will want to help you out. The Spiceworks community brings all sorts of people together from all over the world. A lot of these people are willing to help Spiceworks out in there spare time, things like the Spiceworld 2009 poster contest, there were around loads of good designs and the winner is shown on the right designed by Denise Parrish. Companies like Experts Exchange (BOO HISSSS) and the Spiceworks community (well recommended lets make it bigger than experts exchange…) have managed to grab onto the fact that people in IT are often willing to help out others with IT problems. In my case this is mainly because its better than doing my normal job. This gives the helpers a good feeling that they are doing something with there time and the people being helped managed to get the job done quicker.

This brings a very wide range of people who have many different skill sets into one place doing this brings community, sharing, and connecting. I have used the Spiceworks Spicecorps to meet new people in my area that work in IT and Spiceworld London will help me expand my network of offline friends.

Building up social networks you can give you great feedback on your products. Just look at the Spiceworks community, the 4.5 and feature request sections all the Spiceheads have given feedback on the latest beta version to help make it better and there are 100’s of feature requests of things people want to see in Spiceworks all peppered up (voted for) by the people who use it. Spiceworks have harnessed this power and on many occasions got feedback on there ideas like the HTML emails they just added. They have also managed to get ideas from the community like a dummies guide to Spiceworks in which the community will start to build over the next few months. The community has proven to be a very powerful tool and lots of companies have there own community. Like the smoothwall forums. Spiceworks has managed to grab the market by making a multivendor forum where any question can be asked no matter what its about or how complex someone will be around to help from either the community of the vendors themselves. Microsoft, IBM, CDW and many more have active members of their staff in the community.

The downs (Disadvantages)

The main downside and the reason for writing this post is that news is easily leaked before you want it to be known publicly. My example of this is when Myshell was going to leave. Spiceworks-News managed to get wind of this and got it up on twitter and our wordpress blog around a month before Spiceworks wanted to announce it. Needless to say we quickly got moan at for this has had to delete it. For larger companies multiple sources can leak the information and it becomes hard to stop rumours being made and make covering up a difficult job. (Was a sad day when the famous Myshell (Spiceworks community manager) moved on and left Spiceworks, she did a great job and it does appear from time to time Spiceworks are still finding it hard to fill her boots.)

Information and pictures were published before the release of both the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm, both apple and Blackberry then found it hard to stop people reposting these leaked images even setting up websites about the leaked information. From there people will start rumours about what features the phones will have, this can damage the company if the end product does not have x feature that everyone was getting so excited about. Then again this can help with marketing, I remember stories about when Windows7 was first leaked people believe that Microsoft did this on purpose to get feedback and start all the excitement about the product around a year before it was going to be released. This allowed them to get a wider base of “testers” with different hardware even if they didn’t know they were testing it for them.

Anonymity… well there always has to be one or two people who want to ruin a company. Anyone can setup a website very quickly and with new sites allowing you to register domains without giving your details out to the public you can become even more invisible. This makes it easy for people to moan about products and services of a company without feeling as under threat. Finding people who want to be anonymous can be hard and companies will normally give up trying to hunt down the producers.

With websites so easy to make and publish we can end up with a information overload, it because hard to keep track on the information you want to. Say you want to keep a eye on Spiceworks there are loads of people to follow on twitter… @spiceworks, @spiceworksnews, @jdorfman, @dscammell etc etc etc then you want to follow windows 7 stuff you have to follow loads more people. This distracts from your real job and offline life. You always want to be in the know, for me its so that I can do this sort of thing and repost about 4.5 releases or the latest Spiceworld information even though I wasn’t there. So ok after writing that one I can see positives and negatives…

Social media can however be time consuming, its a Saturday at 14:03 and I’m writing this… I was up till 11 last night watching and taking part in Spiceworld and often find myself being distracted at work by the Spiceworks community all my lunches are taken up by it. If I don’t go out I’m on the community. On the right you can see my Spiceworks Community stats, 3000 odd contributions (these are not all my posts, you get 1 contribution per topic you post in or create) and 6000 odd posts. Ive spent time and written 6 how-tos and 5 plugins for the members off the community. All time I could have spent doing something else like walking the dogs or being in the outdoors enjoying the sun rather than the light bulb above me while sat in a room on my own on my laptop, or even just playing cod4… *must get ring of death on xbox fixed*

Things like twitter and sky player are coming to devices like the xbox making it easier for companies to share information with users in all sorts of forms but this brings another problem for companies that they may not care about us much… their real life morals, is it really right to give people ways to just write 120 words to each other? My anglish isn’t the best as you have probably noticed already and I don’t just blame myself, using word for spell checking and social media where people don’t always mind if you get it wrong. The community allows me to post words that are stupidly wrong and no one seems to care. Its just a fact of life on forums. This is not always something that companies need to care about either, people should have more control and if they don’t do it someone else will so I can’t blame them.

Most of the downs for social media are out of the control for companies like Spiceworks, even if they didn’t take part people would still post the information, but being in the know about what’s being posted can help you can control the impact it has on your products and or services.

That’s it…

Not the most interesting post I know but was mainly posted for the downsides… the big one being the Myshell leaving being announced before Spiceworks told everyone.

Social media does have its up’s and downs but I would suggest any company try to use social media. It doesn’t cost much if anything, but does take up your time.

Hope this helps someone? ok maybe not but hay it was nice to do my first real article the rest of my posts are normally very short and not very sweet.

Sorry about the spealing or grammer’s mistakse, I’m not the best.

And please leave a comment and let me know what you think

I hope Spiceworks don’t mind me using them as examples

Feel free to quote from the above if your going to link back

Again any comments would be lovely

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Spiceworks is the complete network monitoring and managment system, it includes a helpdesk, PC inventory, software and hardware reporting and a network map. Its the solution to manage everything IT in  small and medium businesses.

Focusing on the often-neglected information technology manager is paying off for Spiceworks Inc.

Founded by four former Motive Inc. executives, the Austin company set out four years ago to build software that would make life easier for the workers who oversee computer networks at small and medium-size businesses.

Before writing a line of code, Scott Abel, Jay Hallberg, Greg Kattawar and Francis Sullivan spent three months interviewing IT managers at 40 Austin companies to find out what drove them crazy about managing their systems.

The answer? Just about everything.

Read more

The bit that I though was interesting was:

Spiceworks user Justin Davison, a systems engineer and help-desk manager at material analysis company RJ Lee Group in Pittsburgh, is an example of how the company has won fans.

Davison tried Spiceworks last summer because he needed inventory management software and had nowhere near the $15,000 estimate he received from another company.

“Free was the right price for me,” he said. Read more

There are lots off really good quotes in this article its well worth a read.

Increasingly SpiceHeads refer to Spiceworks as the “Facebook of IT”: the place where they do their job and connect with other IT pros like them.  To us, that is the ultimate validation of what we have been working on which we somewhat academically call a “social business application”.  Social business apps have three ingredients (industry focus, a community, workflow tools & apps) and they weave these together in one seamless user experience.  We use social apps (Facebook) to connect with friends; we use social business apps (Spiceworks) to do our jobs… with other people.

Read more

Thanks to the usability of Apps.gov, more businesses in the public and private sector may be encouraged to investigate cloud computing initiatives of their own. In fact, a significant amount of businesses already have – a recent survey from Spiceworks found that 57 percent of small businesses currently use some kind of cloud computing service.

http://www.edlconsulting.com/newsdetail.php?id=427&headline=Apps.gov:_The_cloud_computing_trendsetter

Not a very big mention but any mention is better than no mention?

It helps show Spiceworks provides useful information to a wide range of people.

Justin recently posted a great article on his blog about the future of Spiceworks.

I just read Andrew Phelps’ article on the Spiceworks Script Center (Beta) and a light bulb turned on.  I have made many predictions about Spiceworks in the past and some of them became a reality.

Here is my new set of predictions of where Spiceworks is headed and if some of them come true I really think it will change the way the IT vendors conduct business with new and exsisting customers.

Ever since the Points System launched this year SpiceHeads have really been more active in the community. Don’t believe me? According to compete in the past year community.spiceworks.com has seen a 109.65% increase!

BTW that is all organic traffic, because the only domain they advertise (PPC) is www.Spiceworks.com which leads you to a well crafted Landing Page.

In his post Justin talks about the future of Spiceworks in 3 ways:

1. Virtual Currency – What if Spiceworks gave you money for posting and getting best answers, what could you do with them and how it would increase the use of the community.
2. The iTunes of IT – At Spiceworld Las Vegas, Greg Kattawar (VP of Dev & Co-Founder) was speaking and kept referring to Spiceworks as “The iTunes of IT”, Spiceworks plan to be everything IT, they want to keep you using there product(s) as much as possible so you see their adverts and they can gain more money from companies like Microsoft and CDW (they really need to find someone like CDW for the UK)
3. Exit Strategy – What happens if it all goes Pete Tong? Justin thinks there are three options they could look at if they needed to… Read his post to find out what they are. For the record I hope for #3

Check out his full post here

Edited: 23/09/09 16:46 (GMT)

Church Tech Matters have done a great article on how to user Spiceworks in a church.

So, now that I have your attention, what is this Spicy thing?

As a church IT volunteer,  our time is limited and we need tools that can help us be more efficient with the time we do have. When I took over as the tech team leader, I knew that the biggest challenge was going to be maintaining the network. I needed a tool that could be my eyes and ears in the environment and let me know when things are not right. For example, some of the canned alerts will tell me when someone has installed new software on their system or if they added the infamous weather-bug.. without having to install expensive 3rd party applications on every workstation in the network.  That is where SpiceWorks comes in.

Read more http://churchtechmatters.com/2009/08/11/getting-it-spicy-at-your-church/

Golden ~Eye~ or Tim Golden recently did a nice write up on Spiceworks

I’ve been a SpiceWorks user since 2007 and have been loving it!

This slidedeck will help explain what Spiceworks is .. a nutshell.. it’s the best free way to monitor your network..

Read more

For Spiceworks-News and well alot of Spiceworks users… #ItSucksWhen (It Sucks When) Spiceworks stops working or starts throwing unkowns at you…

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Read out about page

The SpiceBlog is still alive!!!

Spiceworks seems to have woken up and realised that their blog could provide vital marketing…

With their recent reach of 65,000 IT service providers using Spiceworks they quickly blogged about it.

Strike up the Depeche Mode — Spiceworks is bringing Managed Services to the Masses.  Yesterday we announced that over 65,000 Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT Service Providers (a distinction I’ll get into later) around the world are using Spiceworks to manage client networks.  That means that nearly 10% of the 700,000 IT pros that use Spiceworks are using it in some form to provide Managed Services to the world’s SMBs — simplifying IT for them and making money for the IT consultant.  How cool is that?

And it seems people are still finding it hard to believe Spiceworks is FREE

An Iraq War veteran who had just returned called me up asking if he could use our software to start an IT business in rural Indiana.  He loved our software but he was certain he would have to pay to use it in a commercial situation.  Nope. $0. Go ahead and get as many customers as you can.  He was ecstatic and so was I: someone just became an MSP who couldn’t have done so previously.

The official Spiceworks blog ( http://blog.spiceworks.com/ ) maybe still alive?

Tragedy Of The Commons and Online Communities was posted July 20, 2009 – 11:53 am

In 1968 Garrett Hardin proposed the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons in an article in the journal Science. The basic concept is as follows. Let’s imagine back to the early days of man where a group of cattle-herders lived in a village. They shared a common pasture to graze their cattle. However a conflict quickly emerged. Each individual herder is motivated to profit from the common area for the benefit of his own herd. He has little incentive to ensure there is pasture left for his neighbor’s herd. When every herder behaves in this way the pasture fails for every herder. However, if the herders worked together a healthy pasture could benefit all of them greatly.

Read the rest