Mark Jen Presentation

Mark Jen is a product line manager for Plaxo. His personal blog is Plaxoed.

Here’s his quick case study of Plaxo, which is an on-line smart address book. It lets users of Plaxo update their address book automatically instead of having to gather business cards.

Mark Jen

Concerns have been privacy, security and that they used to send lots of e-mails. They allayed the first two relatively easily, but the third was harder: a perception problem among people who have been on the receiving end of their e-mails. They started a blog, but it wasn’t a silver bullet. They needed to get employees blogging so people knew there were real people behind the company, and then also started communicating with bloggers directly via e-mail, at events and through the blogosphere.

He told his story of being fired from Google for blogging. He had only been at the company for 11 days. At Google there was secrecy built into the corporate culture, but they didn’t want to be transparent. Google had originally caused his blog to go dark, which led to some controversy, but when they fired him it led to a huge PR hit traffic (and monster traffic to his blog).

At Plaxo the policy is pretty straightforward.

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Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

0 thoughts on “Mark Jen Presentation”

  1. Hey Lee, nice synopsis of my talk 🙂 Hope you enjoyed the rest of the seminar!

    P.S. I found your entry through Trackbacks, an automatic mechanism that links blogs together when we link to each other…

  2. Thanks, Mark. I’m kind of new at blogging (at least doing it really actively) so I’m learning the rules of the road. I’ve found it really help to use this blog as a place to gather all the helpful information I’m reading in blogs or hearing at presentations, and your presentation definitely added to my knowledge base. I appreciated being able to get your blogging policy at Plaxo. We will need to develop a blogging policy for my workplace, and seeing yours and the IBM policy will be helpful starting points.

    Question: now that we’re linked via a trackback, will this comment show up on your site too, or should I be commenting at your site?

  3. I just got home from the blogging and podcasting seminar and can’t believe that I actually found my way to your blog, Lee! This is too cool. I almost feel like a voyeur…. surfing, reading, and surfing some more in the brave new world of the blogosphere.

    Thank you, Lee and Mark and all the others for sharing your insights and experiences on blogging and podcasting with us neophytes.

  4. Hi Linda – Thanks for the comment. I hope you’ll continue to engage in and contribute to the conversation, so we can keep learning together.

    Have you started your blog yet?

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