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December 19, 2005
Typepad and evangelism
One key benefit of cultivating customer evangelists: When problems occur, many of your evangelists will rise up to defend you.
We saw that last week with Typepad's recent outage, which surfaced critics but plenty of evangelist-defenders, too. The evangelism for Typepad is a testament to the customer relationship work Six Apart has cultivated since its inception. A good portion of that has been via the accessibility of its founders and key leaders. But rock-solid evangelism takes years to develop. For Apple-like evangelism, it takes a generation.
And in the fast-moving world of Internet services, operations affect loyalty. More than anything else. That's why Pete Blackshaw argues that evangelism for Typepad is probably now in a "holding pattern." (That there is so much discussion about this outage is also indicative of Typepad's influence.)
If Typepad gets through this period of operational growing pains and doesn't inflict more outages on its customers, it should be fine.
But to keep evangelists engaged during a widespread problem that affects them and almost all customers, key leaders (or the CEO) do well to provide copious updates about the problem, what's being done and preparations for the future. Like, hmmm, through a blog :)
Psst: Mena, don't wait to craft a detailed and perfect post about what's been happening. Even if you say nothing, say something. Your evangelists await.
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Spot on about the holding pattern. I've been a huge fan of Typepad since their launch, I got eBay to adopt it when I worked over there and I still use it. But I'm not recommending it anymore. At the same time, a month or so ago when they gave their customers a choice of refunds/credits to make up for the downtime, I opted out -- I told them I wanted them to use the money on their infrastructure.
Jeffrey -- You left eBay? Where are you at these days?
Just in case anyone's tired of TypePad and want to move to WordPress, here's how I moved one of my Typepad accounts. (I'm keeping the other one there, for now at least.)
http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/2005/12/moving_from_typ.html
