Having lunch with the bloggers at Interact 2008
Posted by eileenb on April 10, 2008
I had a great day today in San Diego at Interact 2008. My work, if you can call it that 
was to host the bloggers lunch in the harbour restaurant. down at the marina.
Neeti, who works for the Unified Communications team, had done a great job, working really hard to bring bloggers from around the world to talk to the senior directors from the Exchange and Unified Communications team.
We had an idea to get everyone talking to each other and gave everyone a bag containing 5 of the same things in it. you can see Russ from the Unified Communications User Group in the yellow shirt, marvelling at his bag full of ties in this picture.
This attempt at networking turned into a bit of a melee as the kid robots (only 5 of them) were hunted down, and bartered for… as were the eyeball shoe laces, rubber caterpillars and the skull belts. Hmm – strange lot these bloggers eh?
I arranged for Nino, who runs the Exchange team blog to come over to the event and talk about how the blogging process actually works for team blogs inside Microsoft, and how quickly – or slowly, the items for submission actually get posted on the Exchange team blog. I’d asked some senior people from the Exchange and UC teams (Kim Akers, David Lemson, Amritansh and Eric Swift) to come and attend the panel session (you can see Amritansh holding one of Russ’s spiffy ties in the centre of the picture above)
Then we did something that we’ve never actually done before in a public forum. We gave the bloggers something new to talk about. Something, that we hadn’t released to the press or the public. I won’t spoil their scoop, but check out blogs like Paul, Russ, Dennis, Craig and William for the information that we gave them. And they loved getting the news early.
As Dennis said:
As part of the lunch we got what all bloggers want – news not previously announced (and that we are allowed to blog about) – so here it is 
So listen out Microsoft product teams - your bloggers are your best external evangelists – so give them some news they can blog about from time to time and make them happy.
This was a great first bloggers lunch and an amazing opportunity to really connect with the insiders from the product teams. Lets hope that this initiative from the UC team lead turns into something followed by the rest of the product teams internally…
