CEO blogging honesty – the non smug smugmug
I stumbled across Don MacAskill’s blog this week and was pleasantly surprised. Don is the CEO of SmugMug, a photo site that bills itself as “the ultimate in photo sharing”.
While I’m a flickr user personally, I’ve seen enough people with SmugMug t-shirts and caps at conferences to be intrigued by the site. Actually, I must admit I didn’t know it was a photo site from the schwag – perhaps they could do a better job photo-branding the caps.
Beyond the interesting content, the thing I liked most about Don’s blog was his no bullshit, honest attitude. By reading it you can get a clear feeling for the people behind the company, their ideas and their thought patterns. SmugMug clearly shares our open company philosophy and Don’s blog is further evidence.
His post on SmugMug’s use of Amazon S3 shows an openness to share their advances with others and his honest thoughts on a bad review (see Flickr far superior to SmugMug?) is the perfect way to handle it. He doesn’t go into bullshit corporate denial mode, he accepts the criticism, explains SmugMug’s position and how they are going to improve.
Like people, I don’t expect companies to be perfect (everyone makes mistakes) but I do try to watch for those companies that demonstrate consistent improvement.
His first paragraph is almost an exact parallel to how I feel, and how we work, at Atlassian:
I love reviews like this. First of all, SmugMug doesn’t do any competitive research – we just don’t have time. Instead, we listen voraciously to our customers and our todo list is almost exclusively made up of things our customers want us to add, fix, or change. (Sometimes we have to read between the lines, because they don’t always know exactly how to ask for it, but we do our best). Secondly, we’re awash in positive emails and reviews all the time. They’re nice, but they can give us a false sense of security and obscure the things that we really need to work on. Andy’s review nicely shines light on some areas where we’re weak and gives us a little insight into the competitive landscape at the same time. Thanks Andy!
To me, a CEO’s blog should be the antithesis of a shiny, PR-marketroid-driven blog. It should have personality!
I’m quite sure that this openness leads to increased sales. In my mind the more you honestly know a company the more likely you are to do business with them.
Well done Don, you won one new SmugMug fan (and a subscriber) here!
“In my mind the more you honestly know a company the more likely you are to do business with them”
Well, I could not better agree with this. Trust plays an extremely important role here. I have been watching and tracking Atlassian for about 4 years now and I do want to do more business on Atlassian products