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Confessions of an Online Community Manager Blog by Amber Rae Lambke

I'm passionate about bringing people together for a common purpose. I believe that while online communities can be an incredibly powerful tool for building connections and driving collaboration, they succeed most when one simple rule is followed: people first, technology second. Please join me as I chronicle the good, bad, and ugly of building an online community, driving adoption and awareness, and sustaining momentum. These are my confessions...

Posts: 7 | Created on March 25, 2009 | 1

Are you eating your own dog food?

By Amber Rae Lambke in Confessions of an Online Community Manager on Friday, April 10, 2009 12:09 AM  
Tags: community dog food marketing product training | Post a Comment

I've been at Leverage almost two months now (wow! time flies) and I've been working on-site, in San Francisco, just over a month. Leading the company's marketing, it's my responsibility to design an effective, cost-efficient lead generation program. To do this, I must have a detailed, objective understanding of Leverage as well as the market in which we operate. Being a start-up, there was no "official" training. Instead, I had to simply jump in and go. Lucky for me, this is my preferred style of working and even luckier for me, the very platform that we sell enabled me to do this very quickly.

Our version of training is email notifications welcoming you into two communities: one to our private internal network and the other to our open community, Labs, the platform I'm currently using to write this blog post. Initially, I was delighted that our company was fully leveraging our product in our day-to-day activities, but little did I know how powerful these tools were! All the company knowledge I'll ever need to do my job well is stored here. The brainpower, hard work and ideas generated by each person who's touched Leverage is at my fingertips. Every day I learn something new, I find some tidbit of information that helps me do my job better, I better understand how powerful our platform is, and I realize the immense opportunity we have to help others do their job better too. 

This personal experience led me wonder: are you eating your own dog food?

No, not that dog food. Your company "dog food!" Do you use the product that your company makes?

From wikipedia: “To say that a company “eats its own dog food” means that it uses the products that it makes. For example, Microsoft emphasizes the use of its own software products inside the company. “Dogfooding” is a means of conveying the company’s confidence in its own products.”

If you haven't already had enough food, here's some food for thought.

 

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