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Fonk for Thoughts: Bas Paumen
Dutch Microsoft audience marketing manager Bas Paumen is involved in corporate brand building. Time for his Fonk for Thoughts...
Photo Bas Paumen: 'Bringing back the emotion and personality to the brands of Microsoft.' BlogFonk: Who is Bas Paumen? Where are you from? Paumen: Bas Paumen is a Dutch marketing dude, surfed the internet bubble waves, now working at Microsoft in the field of community marketing/management. Trying to build a connection between people and technology, changing the idea of being a company whose technology everybody has to use to the technology everybody wants to use. BlogFonk: Do you love your work? Why (not)? Paumen: Working in the field of community marketing is a great place to be in right now, online community tools are maturing; people are looking for offline and online recognition of theirs skills and knowledge in comparison to their peers, and are very willing to show their expertise to colleagues. Using this in the field of marketing and position Microsoft as the glue in their community and being the enabler of their careers is a challenging job. BlogFonk: What is 'building a community' around the brand Microsoft all about? Paumen: Bringing back the emotion and personality to the brands of Microsoft. Showing the customers and technology enthusiast that Microsoft creates its technology with passion vision and not only to generate revenue. BlogFonk: Is there difference in mentality of creative professionals in the countries you've worked? Paumen: I think it's not easy to make these kind of generalisations. In this current job I work together very close with all me peers around the world, the solutions and ideas generated among these people are less depending on geographical location then on personality of the individual, but you can say that especially in the field of community marketing the cultural background of the market you serve is very influencing on your thinking. BlogFonk: What are the latest important developments you've noticed in your business? Paumen: If you define 'my business' as community marketing, the audiences very heavy into technology have always been very active in building communities to keep themselves up to date and knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the cutting edge developments. This for instance has even resulted in development of new technologies of their own (Open source). Technology companies start to understand more and more what role they play in these communities and in what way we can support and enable them to make it easier and more fun and grow the reach beyond the groups who were already participating. BlogFonk: Which project are you most proud of? Paumen: I think we can be proud of the fact that we can see already a slight change in the perception of the technical audiences towards Microsoft by adding personality to the brands and being open and willing to listen, and being responsive to their needs. Using games to communicate valuable content and training and let the audience show their skills and expertise to their peers has shown to be successful too. A good example of how Microsoft can be the glue in the community. BlogFonk: If you'd be given the chance to do something over again, what would that be? Paumen: All the instances where we were not able to provide a good follow up, instances were we provoked interaction but where we were not able to use it in our advance due to scalability of the used tools and techniques. BlogFonk: Finally, what is your motto, your 'Fonk for Thoughts' (inspiration to be creative)? Paumen: Will get back on this...no inspiration today! |
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posted by BlogFonk: Friday, November 26, 2004 [#]