This evening I spoke with someone that has some insight into what's going on. The social media guy at PTC is trying to drive traffic to the ptc community site, in order to get the site metrics up. The problem is most of us old farts don't go to the site. Heck, I hardly ever come here to the PTCUser site. I'm using it right now because I'm away from my work email this week.
If we just look at the PTCUser site, when I send out this email, down at the bottom of the site it tells me that this will reach 1799 users. If I were to post on the community web site, I may reach no one. Or at least no one that knows an answer.
If you are like me, you work for a living, I don't have time to go check out a web site. But since I filter my incoming mail into sub folders of my outlook in box, when I have a few minutes, I'll go check what emails I've received from this list and the system admin list. And normally once a day I'll check out the Windhcill Solutions list. Every few months I'll grab all these emails and drag them into matching archive folders for future searching.
This afternoon I went to the community site and I didn't see a way to reply Ryan's post touting how good this move was going to be. Perhaps I have to log in to reply. But then I'm not sure I remember what my password is.
I've been on this mail exploder since Don Patterson put it together. I wasn't kidding when I said this is the goose that laid the golden egg. This exploder has been a huge benifit to me.
The other thing that concerns me is the independence of PTCUser. Just like competition from Solidworks and other CAD vendors drives improvements in the PTC product. So do the complaints and bitching that happens on this exploder. Without that irritation, many improvements we take for granted now would never have come about.
I'll speak for this old fart, I'm a social media ludite. I've never been on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other sites out there. I email folks, and pick up the phone to call them. I finally got an iPhone in Feburary, so now I text my neice & nephew once in awaile. But half the time I don't have the phone on me, it's sitting in the car or at home on the dresser. I'm not about to log into a web site to look for and answer questions from people I don't know.
I feel I know the folks here even though some of you I've never met in person. To me the mail exploder is the real PTC community.
If they want to drive traffic to the ptc community website, they need to have something up there that is of value to go get. That means PTC needs to invest in it. We are not going to build that value for them.
In my opionion the mail exploder is perfect as it is. It's a mail exploder, that's how people should access it. Filter you inbox into seperate folders and it will work perfectly for you.
Dave Haigh, The high tech ludite admin, Creo expert.
