Check intentions before criticizing | Wrike.com is an interesting tool for collaboration
I didn’t catch it when it originally came through the feed from Crunchnotes, but after both Shel Israel and B.L. Ochman commented on a video from the Wrike development team, I had to take a look. Shel asks “(1) What is the name of the company? (2) Just what did they launch?” B.L. adds “I hope they know more about software than they do about marketing.”
Let’s take a look…
Okay. Having watched the film, something didn’t quite sit right. Yes, it’s definitely more in the camp of Manos The Hands of Fate than in the Citizen Kane category. BL and Shel are right - it’s a horrible marketing piece - but was it ever intended for marketing purposes? This is, after all, removed from all context. If I were to print off one of the posts about Benny Bix, one would say it’s lousy marketing. And I’ve been looking, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what Shel’s new book is called or when I can buy it from the photos of his Maui trip.
I fired a note off to Wrike to ask just ‘what was the intention of the video?‘
Andrew Filev was kind enough to write back, “The software sells itself, so the video was just for fun. When you work 90 hrs a week, you need to have breaks.”
Heavily caffeinated coders with access to a video camera and net connection. Pretty much what I suspected.
It’s easy to kibitz. And I know, the blogosphere moves at a hectic breakneck pace. But sometimes it’s important to just take a moment. Step back and and dig a little deeper, or ask a question or two before posting. Because the risk is that we kill the thing what we really want out of the social web … real people speaking in their own human voice.
These are not marketing drones trying to seed the net with their ‘viral video‘. This is not an elevator pitch with accompanying 57 slide PowerPoint. It’s just some hard working folks who are having some fun and trying to give others a smile.
Now - having taken a couple minutes, I can tell you that Wrike looks like an interesting tool for collaboration and project management. I also like their vision of helping to build more transparent and open companies by helping everyone stay on track and in the loop. That it can be put into use by simply including wrike@wrike.com in your CC list means that it will be easy to integrate into existing workflow. Take a peak at their actual demo video for a quick and dirty overview of what Wrike is and can do. Me - I’m bookmarking this and will be giving it a test-drive the first opportunity that I have.
