Adobe, Eric Anderson

posted: November 2, 2006 2:00 AM

1.1.1 Company: Adobe

Blogger: Eric Anderson
Student Interviewer: Amanda Nastari
Blog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/eanderson/

Eric Anderson is the Product Manager for Adobe’s Flex product. Adobe Flex is an application development solution for building rich Internet applications. Eric formerly worked for Macromedia when it merged with Adobe and he worked for Allaire Corp when it merged with Macromedia. Macromedia was an early corporate blogging company inspired by Jeremy Allaire.

Eric started work with Allaire Corporation six years ago.  He started blogging to get information out to his customer community quickly.  The blog is primarily a way to get technical information out to customers and gather feedback. Eric said that blogging was a way to get "tidbits of information what weren't full blown papers out to the community."

Macromedia allowed its employees to write about their products and a blog aggregator was developed to allow like-minded bloggers to aggregate their blogs together.  This Macromedia blog aggregator was before sites like technorati.com and other RSS feed aggregators were around.  The Macromedia aggregator had content from both Macromedia and other bloggers who wrote Macromedia related blog posts outside of the company.

Eric said that the culture at Adobe is much more controlled by legal than the culture at Macromedia.  However, Eric said that there was a desire to be more open at Adobe over time.  Adobe has hundreds of blogs and the company pays for its employee blogs.  There is no editorial control process for blogging at the company.

Eric told us that his blog helped encourage 30-50 people blogging about Flex, his product. The blog has become a place for the community to go to for information about Flex. When Eric attends a conference, he finds it very rare that customers have not already read his blog.  The blog gives Eric "immediate technical credibility" with his audience.

Eric thought that, "publishing content that people need " is very important when building a successful blog. Eric was skeptical of comments generated on blogs, as he has no way to validate the identity of the person who commented.  Eric has found it to be difficult to get honest feedback on such major products as Flash and Flex.  Eric said the posts that generate the most traffic are those posts that discuss Adobe's competitors and competing technologies or posts about a product’s future direction.

Eric stated that his style of blog writing has progressed over time.  He used to write about new releases and content he had not written but he got tired of referencing this type of material.  Eric currently writes about technical information not covered anywhere else. He sees the blog as a very useful tool for communicating technical information with his audience. He sees his blog as a place that established his credibility as a technical writer with his community. Eric said that technical content rather than personal content was the type of content that generated the most comments and traffic to his blog.

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