Personal Interaction Matters

One of the most important contributions to the blogosphere is the personal touch that can be given to projects/companies that can be impersonal. This kind of personal touch can be incredibly influential in helping your reputation, whether it is personal or corporate.

One thing happened today that made me respect MSN a little more. I got a comment on one of my MSN Desktop Search posts from David Dawson, Group Program Manager for the product. I didn’t send him an email. I don’t know anybody on the inside who called him for me. How he found my blog is completely unknown to me. But he did. And he responded to me. And, actually, he was right. The file I tried to click was in a folder I moved, so the index hadn’t caught up yet. Thanks for the tip. Now, the significance here is not the fact that I know that little snippet, though it is nice to know. The significance is in the personal touch. It’s easy to dislike a product/company/person when they aren’t really in your face. But once you’ve had personal contact of some sort, even like this, they become much more human. Thanks, David, for the time you were willing to spend.

But sometimes we fail at this. I did that twice this month. I took way too long to respond to two emails send to me requesting info on Lexel’s Koineworks Diagramming tutorial (our website is rather sparse at the moment on the product). That was not good at all. That was stupid. It’s not that I don’t like people; it’s just that I didn’t respond immediately and then forgot to send one. I’m very absentminded, and being so busy I bet that I do this much more than I am aware in my general e-mail life. This is not good PR, personally or corporately.