For anyone interested in using social media as a resource for product requirements, persona development, use cases, and other customer insights, the workshop on this topic is scheduled for later this month.

The goal is to give you specific, practical guidance that you can use the day after the workshop. Therefore, I'm asking attendees to bring examples of their current challenges in gaining customer insights, from either a product management or product marketing perspective. We'll use those scenarios during some hands-on exercises.

Here's the link to the workshop, if you're interested. Space is limited, and based on the number of questions I get about this topic, it should be a lively session.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

In October, I'm doing a workshop in the Foster City office about social media for product teams. How can social media fill in the gaps left by traditional requirements? Which social media outlets should you use to answer particular questions? What skills and investments are required? What's the tangible business benefit?

A big part of the workshop is hands-on experience with the questions your team faces. Bring an example of a burning question that the product team needs to answer (e.g., What's the impact of dropping this feature? Is our product a good fit for similar business problems in other markets?), and we'll explore how to use social media to find substantive, useful answers quickly.

For more details, click here. Also, in a couple of weeks, colleague Laura Ramos is doing a workshop, "Making B2B Marketing Work," that chock full of useful content.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

I forgot to cross-post "Beware of the naked man" last night. Since people kindly left comments to the post, I have to rectify that oversight.

The post is about the role of social media in product requirements. Is it a supplement or replacement for other requirements sources? How hard is it to get good information out of social media?

All three parts of the series on social media as a new source of requirements data are now published. The first shows how product teams can use social media to create reach more accurate conclusions than traditional sources of requirements (customer visits, enhancement requests, customer advisory boards, etc.) alone can provide.

The second document distills the lessons learned from attempts to use social media in this "inbound role" into a methodology, PLOT (persona, location, options, test). Since the choice of which social media can best answer particular kinds of questions isn't immediately obvious, I devoted the third document to that topic alone.

During the research for this series, it became glaringly obvious that there is a major dividing line in the type of information that product teams collect and analyze: