Earlier in the week I talked about evangelism and why it's important to have customers that can share your product. But before you can get those customers you need to inspire them. This is where it's important to have a team of evangelists that can get the ball rolling.
A Team of Evangelists can Share Unique Knowledge
Customers can discuss their favorite features of your product but they'll never know it as intimately as your team does. The developers will know the ins-and-outs of technical details, support will know which questions people ask most often, sales will know which products get purchased together, and management will know the direction of the company and future products.
You can have an absolutely amazing product but if no one knows about it, it's hard to make money and keep working on it. To have a product that actually makes money you should make use of this knowledge.
How We Share Knowledge
At WooThemes we do a great job encouraging people to pursue whatever interests they have. And since everyone's interests and knowledge are different we have a huge array of resources for our customers.
- Coen Jacobs, one of our developers, loves to talk about software development and our development strategy on his blog
- Maria Scarpello, our internal community manager, loves to talk and network at WordCamps (she just spoke at WordCamp Charleston)
- Danny Santoro, one of our support ninjas, is currently cutting the video from our North American WooTrip and it will be shared on the WooThemes blog soon.
- Remi Corson, another support ninja, also loves video and has been helping the themes team promote their products.
- Mike Krapf, Chief Happiness Officer, is planning on speaking at UserConf this fall.
- Matt Cohen, shares his knowledge of product design on Torque.
- Warren Holmes talks about how important documentation is for sales on his blog.
Some of us are active on Twitter, some of us guest post, some of us show up on podcasts, and we interact in all sorts of ways with the community. In the end there isn't one right way. There are a million right ways.
Community Engagement
When you have a team that shares all of these resources you're really encouraging the community to engage and interact with your product. I can tell you without a doubt in my mind that the community loves it. Just looking through my own blog I have hundreds of positive comments. And more mind boggling than that is I have users helping other users via the comments on my blog. Amazing.
And here's the thing. This wouldn't ever happen if WooThemes didn't encourage us to share our knowledge.
More important than building a team of the best programmers is to build a team of people who are passionate. People who believe in your product and want to share. All you need to do is give them a bit of time, encouragement, and the freedom to do so and they'll make amazing resources for your product.