I don't have a dog in this fight: Lotus Marketing

**The comments, views and opinions in this blog post are mine and mine alone. They do not in any way, shape or form represent the company that I work for. Period. It is my opinion**

Once again coming up for air from my self-imposed blogging break. For the past couple of months since coming back from Lotusphere, I've been heads down in migrating users from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes. Or as I've been calling it , Digital Moses duty. Guiding people to the promised land of communication and collaboration! Sounds all nice and flowery that way, doesn't it.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been noticing the increasing wave of peppered blog posts and heated comment-thread debates about Lotus and how well it does or does not do with marketing it's products to the world. But one thing that I've notice from the blogs and comments are it's either an IBM employee or business partner driving the discussion/debate. Maybe I've missed it but, I haven't seen a lot of names that are customers. It's either someone who is either responsible for or gets paid by someone that is responsible for selling the Lotus product line and services related to such. Where are the other voices?

Well, here is a voice of a Domino Administrator that works at a company that is a customer.
Dear Lotus and the IBM Over-Lords,
Your marketing stinks, and here's why.

Last week the email went out about the "Smart World" campaign. Great idea and looks cool, but, the people I work for don't go to YouTube to look at products and make capital spending decisions. They don't follow Twitter or Linkedin to see what's going on either.
My company has for the most part, relied upon old-school face to face visits from vendors to hear about what is going on in the market place and what their software can do for them. They also learn about things from the vendors because they stop by all the time and see what's going on with us and how their software can help fill in any gaps. For example, one software vendor we have and that will remain nameless is here all the time. Literally. And it's not Microsoft. And it's their messaging and collaboration package that I fear is probably more of a threat to us loosing Domino then Microsoft is. But it doesn't matter to me in the end. I'll still have a job. I love using the Lotus product line, would love to see us move into using Quickr, but is that my job to be that salesperson? Or to forward a link to a YouTube video?
That stuff is all great and flashy, but the value of face-to-face communication should not be overlooked.
Like I stated in the blog title, "I don't have a dog in this fight". Well...I don't.
But from the customer viewpoint, I don't think the word is getting to the people who need to hear it.

Just my opinion.