Maybe a slightly confusing title….but I wasn’t sure what to call it. Mary?!
Last week while I was in Helsinki on a training course (FlexiPlatform O & M- its the new building block for new packet core hardware) I met up with Nokia blogger extraordinaire Tommi Vilkamo of blogs.s60.com/tommi in his office in Valimotie, a quick trip from where I was.
We had a really nice salad lunch (Nokia always manage to have nice tasty salads:) ), and a good chat about blogging and Nokia.
I listened intently to Tommi as he explained how wikis, and blogs started inside Nokia, and quickly spread to becoming equal (in some cases) as the supported tools (for a certain period of time the wiki rebels were running wikis off their desktops PCs but the amount of usage quickly warranted dedicated hardware 
).
We also had a chat about how blogs can help Nokia to listen to a fairly niche (but important) group of consumers (or whatever they are called nowadays) - technical users.
While we agreed that tech. users (early adopters, or whatever) are not the average user, their attention to detail and extreme analysis of features can focus some of the attention on where things need to be improved. We also agreed that blogs and techy reviews (how many reviews have you seen about the N95 and the new Nokia Maps application?) can be used to find more questions for the marketing / sales people.
One good example Tommi gave was he collected all the reviews of one of the new Nokia handset devices, and condensed them into important points that shoulod be looked at. He mentioned that this was received very well.
That’s the kind of product review/product research they would pay a fortune for.
We also then spoke about how does a group (company/arm/whatever) like Nokia Siemens Networks start a blog, or use blogs.
Nokia mobile devices can write blogs fairly easily because, well, everyone wants to know what the next/latest/greatest feature is coming to phones. The customer is the public, whereas the client of Nokia Siemens Networks is, well, the mobile operator.
My question was how does a company, who’s clients (O2, Vodafone, Movistar, H3G, etc) communicate information amongst the public/their clients and not give away competitive information? Put another way, how do you explain what O2 is doing with HSDPA, and H3G is doing with location services without given the other inside information?
We both agreed that it was a difficult thing to do, and that it needed to be done in a sensitive way. [You can't mention one in a good light and another in a bad way]
Does anyone have any idea?
He did mention a very interesting blog written by a guy called Martin Sauter who writes at http://mobilesociety.typepad.com/ who writres about mobile network technology in general, and doesn’t mention what the operators are doing.
Maybe thats a good idea. Or maybe no-one wants to know what the network does, and just wants to know what the end device does? It would be a pity if that was the case, because I think each go hand-in-hand.
Anyway, we had a nice lunch, and a nice chat. We agreed to try and do a blogger beer-up when I go back to Helsinki again in a few weeks.
You’re all more than welcome. (but I should warn you, it’ll probably be -20 C like it was last time!)
Thanks Tommi, and see you soon.
[tags] runningwithbulls.com , tommi vilkamo , nokia , nokia siemens networks , blogs [/tags]
Perhaps I’m missing something, but wouldn’t the simplest approach be to encourage the service providers to blog about it within their own restrictions, and then link to the relevant posts from a Nokia blog?
That way the service provider has control over what is released or not, and Nokia gets to boast about it. All this can be done automatically with feeds, tags (fornokia, forexample!), and an aggregator.
adam
Perhaps it’s true that more people are interested in reading about mobile devices than about mobile networks — but that doesn’t mean blogging about networks isn’t worthwhile. Quite the contrary, I think, as it’s an underreported area.
I would imagine there are plenty of topics such a blog could cover without even getting into specific products, necessarily, or come close to touching sensitive customer information. Or, if there are particular things along those lines a blogger would want to discuss, they could always do so in hypothetical scenarios, or by getting the operators’ relevant PR people to sign off. But I think those types of blog entries could be less important than ones discussing the wide range of issues and problems the networks business is dealing with, as well as the flood of new technologies it’s introducing. But all of that depends on your target audience.
Hi Adam,
(You never cease to amaze me with your fun URLs!)
Yes, most definately. This would be the easiest thing. But two things: 1) the operators are kinda slow on moving when it comes to this kind of thing, and 2) it might be hard to get involved in it
The one good thing about someone from Nokia blogging about it (or maybe not necessairly from Nokia)would be they would have access to alot of information, since you would have to know about the network products to blog about it. Or maybe not?
This is just a thought really at the moment. I had been thinking about how would people in Nokia Siemens Networks blog about their work…projects..
Actually….sory just reading your message again, when you say service providers, do you mean the mobile service provider (your O2s, and Vodafones), or the hardware service provider (.ie NSN)?
Well from the POV of what tools to use, of course, there are loads. Inside Nokia (and when it gets going NSN) there are loads of social tools being used (I have written about that here: http://www.runningwithbulls.com/blog/2006/11/24/social-tools-inside-nokia/)
I don’t know, maybe I am on the wrong tac here…any ideas welcome.
b.
More where they come from. Frankp did a cartoon for my next one.
I was talking about the service providers, but I don’t see why it has to be restricted. Let anyone that wants to talk about implementation blog about it, and add tags to their posts that network developers can pull in via RSS. If they’re worried about guff getting onto their aggregator, they can pre- or post-moderate. Network developer bloggers can then comment and expand on posts in the aggregator.
Yes, the network developers have better access to more information, but it’s the service providers that need to control release of that information, so their innovation isn’t compromised. Or they could just grow up and act like big boys, and open up their processes and protocols so the mobile networks as whole work together. What are the odds of that happening though?
(Off topic but it’s a - pardon my language, but it’s deserved; nay required - fucking disgrace that I still can’t sync my phone to an information manager of my choosing (tbird). It’s the one single thing left that locks me to a Windows VM if I’m running Linux.)
The slowness of operators/providers to move on things like this can of course be blamed on the above. And the bit in brackets too. The pace they move at in the non-handset sector is much akin to Communist Russia. Or modern Ireland.
adam
Hi Carlo,
thanks for the comment. I have to say I am a pretty regular reader of MobHappy, so thank you for the comment.
Heh, thank you. I thought so also..but it seems that people forget about the thing that never gets seen
I agree completely. And from a broader point of view, I think that handset people can learn alot from network people, and vice-versa, particularly about the technologies that deliver the content to the handsets.
I’ll have to digest this bit..and I’ll get back to you!
Stick around
thanks
b.
I also think that there’s a myriad of network related topics that are worth to be discussed publicly in a blog and that can be discussed controversially without mentioning specific products or network operators. Where’s the list to which I can add ideas?
Hi Adam,
Not sure if I follow you. I could be stupid though.
Ok, I get you. From chatting with some other guys in Nokia and also looking at Martin Sauter’s blog (http://mobilesociety.typepad.com/) I think the way to do it might be to just talk about the technologies and hardware used. That would make it easier to talk about stuff in that I wouldn’t have to be worried about some hassle from any MN operator.
Two hopes - Bob Hope and No Hope, and Bob Hope is gone on holidays
Hmm, is Thunderbird now a PIM? I would have thought it’s still “just” a mail client (a damn good one, all the same). I haven’t used it in a while so I don’t know.
Yes, I agree that the support for other operating systems is abit lacking in Nokia phones. But I do have my E61 synching nicely with my Mac (no other software used!)
I think thats all operators Adam, they are interested in making a buck (or in Ireland’s case, alot of them) and they still don’t know what the hell is going on with this Internet thing.
They’ll figure it out soon though!
b
Hi Carlo,
Getting PR people (from operators anyway) to discuss something would be difficult. I haven’t seen much blogging/Internet type stuff from any operator really. There are some clever comms. (as in corporate communications) people in Nokia that are bringing these things up, but not sure if they are doing it with operators yet.
Thats a good point. So what kind of topics would you like to read about? The problem for me is that there are tonnes of topics! The benefit for me is, of course, that I learn more about them as I go along!
Also, a very good point. The target audience, well I am not really sure about that. Where do you think it could be?
As you can see, I am pretty open to suggestions, ideas, and topics to cover. So keep the ideas coming.
thanks
bernard
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I too have been wondering how the blogging community within the company, which from what I’ve seen has been pretty well hidden, can be brought into the public eye.
I don’t think there is such a problem with giving information to the oppositions if we at least use some common sense when we post, for instance, rather than going into vast technical details about how an operator has achieved a certain feature, we should be able to at least talk about the feature, maybe the sort of thing that has to be done (the concepts) to enable the feature on a network (you never know, we may spark some interests in non-telecoms people), without talking much about any operator in specific.
If we could get the agreement from some operators to be able to post some ‘feature matrices’, that might be good for end-users, but that’s probably something an unbiased organisation’s website should have.
I have thought that with the split that’s going to happen, all the blogs are currently in the Mobile Phones business, and we in Nokia Siemens Networks would then be ‘cut-off’. I’d like to get involved as much as I can, if you’d like to discuss.