This week has been an interesting one for me as it marks the beginning of my tenure as ‘the voice of Quirky’. In the seven months I’ve been with Quirky as a community ambassador I’ve been able to get incredible insight into both sides of the Quirky equation and I’m excited to take on this new role.
Without a doubt, one of the biggest issues we have to address is communication between Quirky staff and the Quirky community. We dropped the ball and the absence of reliable communication has created tension and trust issues. You guys are what make Quirky special, and without you we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are right now. I know that. Ben knows that. Everyone at Quirky knows that. In order to keep this relationship healthy, both sides are going to have to work on how we communicate with each other.
Here’s what you can expect from us.
We’re going to continue to hold quarterly town meetings. The last one took place in January (Q1). The meeting that was originally scheduled for May 17th will take place at some point in June, which, although slightly delayed, is still on track for taking place in Q2. The remaining two meetings for 2011 will likely take place towards the end of Q3 and Q4, meaning September and December respectively.
In addition to town meetings, we’re going to start providing you with monthly updates from different departments within Quirky. As part of this initiative we’re going to be bringing back production reports as well as introducing sales reports from Chad, change logs from our tech team, and a monthly Q&A with Ben.
On a day to day basis, Shirley is going to continue to rock Get Satisfaction, our support forum, which we will be discussing in further detail in another blog post as there seems to be a good deal of confusion within the community as to why it exists. As always, any questions, complaints, concerns, compliments or other nouns that start with C (preferably cake) can be sent to questions@quirky.com.
One thing that we won’t be doing is replying to service related questions in the forum. The forum is a venue for community chatter, talking about Quirky behind its back and general irreverence. While we might occasionally partake in the aforementioned irreverence, that’s as far as our involvement with the forum will get.
Now, here’s the fun part… well, for me at least.
As I mentioned, this change has to come from both sides. Here’s what needs to change in the community.
Moving forward, all information from within Quirky is going to be provided to, and disseminated by the community team. The same has to go for information coming from the community. We’re called ‘community ambassadors’ for a reason. It’s our responsibility to represent you and your interests to the rest of Quirky. Regardless of whether you have a sales question, a design question, a manufacturing question, etc. it has to go through us. When you send an email to another member of the staff, all they do is forward it to questions@quirky.com and then we handle it as we would with any other request. Just email questions@quirky.com directly and it will make all our lives easier.
Finally, there’s been a lot of abject negativity and nastiness going around lately, not only toward Quirky, but toward each other. This site is open to the public. Anyone on Earth (over the age of 18) is welcome to join this community, and when newbies come in and see these ugly interactions, whether it be on the forum, or even worse, on idea submissions, it doesn’t make them want to stick around and it makes everyone involved look bad. This needs to stop. There are an infinite number of places on the internet where you can be an asshole. Starting today, this isn’t one of them.
That all being said, believe it or not, I actually do love you guys. The things that we’ve done together so far are disruptive and amazing and there’s no end in sight.
Now let’s get to work.
