Thwack, perception and reality

Donald_Francis

Reality - Thwack is a community forum

Perception - if every post is not answered by SW staff people are being ignored.

 

Reality - I see a good many eval posts on here, not answering them = lost sales.

 

Just my 2 cents.

FormerMember

Donald,

Every single post is read by someone here at SolarWinds.  Many posts are read by quite a few people.  We email thwack links to each other all day.  I say or hear the word "thwack" hundreds of times a day, as do probably most of the employees.  So this  community is very much on our minds.  We pay attention.  Still, we don't respond to every post.  That is intentional.  We've created and nurtured thwack to be a place for our community to commune, as it were.  We view ourselves as a part of the community, and we actively participate, and we answer a lot of questions (Dawn, our community manager, has tons of stats on exactly how we're doing this. Tons!). 

But we don't answer  every question, and we don't answer questions as fast as we possibly could because we want this to be a many-to-many conversation.  We want the community to feel ownership of thwack as much as we do.  There are many questions that only SW can answer, and those we should answer.  If you see those going unanswered, feel to prod us.  Call us out by name.  We do our best, but we miss things.  But there are questions that the community can answer, and we prefer if the community does so.  That will occasionally leave something unanswered.  It's the price we pay to keep thwack from becoming a "Dear SolarWinds" platform where people post and we (and only we) answer.

And as for customers evaluating the product, I'm sure anyone who's bought recently can attest that our Sales team will follow up every download with an email, a phone, or both to check on how things are going.  If a customer is in technical trouble, we have a fantastic team of sales engineers who will get on a web meeting and help the customer.  So sometimes, you see a question posted on thwack from some hapless evaluator, and it doesn't get answered because the real solution has been provided by an SE outside of thwack.

I'm sure that you got more philosophy-of-thwack than you were expecting, but I'm feeling loquacious this Saturday morning, and it was a good opportunity to spell out some of our thinking because we do think about this community quite a bit in our collective hive mind.