How I currently feel about Nokia’s blogging situation: A simple replace command away

This is the original post. I simply replaced every instance of the word Oracle with the word Nokia:

I’ve been following the interesting debate about Nokia’s presence in the blogosphere that Justin kicked off with "I Don’t Get It" (helpfully summarized by Doug Burns).

I think Scoble has the right idea (emphasis mine):

Find the bloggers we don’t yet know who are writing about Nokia … Bring them in to meet Larry Ellison Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and your management teams. But even better, let them talk with the engineers building your products.

Indeed. If there’s one thing that I think differentiates Nokia’s corporate blogging from the corporate blogging of other big technology companies, it’s that sometimes our emphasis when connecting with the blogosphere is not at the engineering level, but at the technical marketing level. This isn’t some centrally orchestrated blogging policy – it’s just the level at which Nokia has always communicated to the outside world, and it’s a hard thing to change overnight.

One of the powerful effects Microsoft’s vast army of engineering bloggers had on me when I first discovered blogs.msdn.com was that, for the first time, I could hear insightful stuff from the folks in the trenches actually building (as opposed to promoting) Microsoft’s software. Folks I could really connect with, because they too were building software.

There’s something of an implicit trust and understanding there, because often (not always, but often) when engineers talk to others about the technology they love, the bulls**t filters are lowered to a minimum. I think that’s a big part of the reason why Scoble’s work on Channel 9 while he was with Microsoft was such a resounding success. Again, very often he was talking to the guys who actually wrote the software. That very direct connection was hugely effective.

So, I agree with Scoble. We need to connect the bloggers outside Nokia (the number of whom has grown enormously over the last few years) who care about our products with the engineers inside Nokia who care about and build those products. Heck, I work for Nokia and I also want to hear much more from other engineers who work here. This company is huge, and we’re surely doing lots of interesting things.

blogs.Nokia.com is an inspiration, and Justin and his team at OTN are doing a great job with it and other initiatives. Before blogs.Nokia.com was created, engineers at Nokia would frequently avoid blogging altogether because it was never officially sanctioned.

Things are better now. We’re a world away from where we were just a few years ago. But I think we still have a bit to go. I hope we can continue to improve and connect the people at the heart of creating the technology here with people who are passionate enough to want to learn about it and talk about it, to tell us (and the world) when we could be doing better and when things are just right.

This is exactly the revolution I want to start within Nokia, but it will be difficult as an outsider.

Step One: Get to Finland