The Yahoo! Music team recently started the Y! Music Blog (YMB?). Ian Rogers kicked it off with an introduction to the blog’s purpose:
The main purpose of this site is to decrease the distance between you, the Yahoo! Music user, and the people whose job all day (and often all night) is to build Yahoo! Music products and utilities. I thought it only appropriate to kick off this site with a helpful list of ways you may contact us, for your reference.
Some responses have questioned whether this is “official Yahoo” or not, but I don’t think the distinction matters much. Ian offers some clarification:
While the folks posting at YMusicBlog.com are Yahoo! employees, this is not an “official” Yahoo! site. We’re posting here because we’re passionate about what we do for a living, want to communicate about it, and blogging makes it very easy for us to do so.
I’m interested in the idea of providing a better communications link from a company (or product team) to its users. There’s a lot of buzz around “transparency”, but most of the examples I’ve seen come from smaller companies. What if you have a really large user base (in the millions, say), but want to improve this communication flow with your users? Most of the large company blogs I’ve seen are either PR-driven, or are from high-visibility individuals. (Microsoft does seem to have a few good product-focused or team blogs.)
I’ll be anxious to follow the Y! Music Blog to see how it flows and what type of user interactions are created. There has been some talk about doing the same for Messenger, so we might follow as well.
