Nortel Buzzboard

Welcome to the grand opening of Nortel Buzzboard — Nortel’s official news blog.

Those of you who already follow this blog are probably asking how exactly we can be celebrating a grand opening when I’ve been posting since January.  The answer is simple - marketing.

Actually it’s a bit more than that.  You see, when we started posting in January, it was pretty much impossible to find Buzzboard because we didn’t promote or link to it from anywhere else on nortel.com.  I have no idea how some of our early readers found us, but they did.

Eventually we added a small link from Nortel’s news page.  But if we ever celebrate a birthday for Buzzboard (and I guess we should since that seems like a cool Web 2.0 thing to do), it will likely be on March 6th.  On that day, Mark Evans became the first “outsider” to acknowledge our existence with this post and an add to his blogroll.

Since then, we’ve been added to the blogroll of other sites, including Rich Tehrani’s blog and even the Brad Reese on Cisco blog on Network World.  And while our readership has grown faster than I could have hoped, we still have never really done any kind of big push to get the word out about this blog.

In telecom circles we call that a “soft launch.”

So today we are putting some old fashioned marketing effort into this new communications channel that many people see as decidedly different than their perception of “old Nortel.”  We now have a shiny new link dead-center in the middle of the nortel.com home page.  You can also find us now on the press release index page, in our eMedia kit, and very soon on Nortel’s blog home page.  We’re also letting customers, media, analysts and even Nortel employees know about the blog through other communications channels.  No press release though.

So now on to what this blog is all about.  What we do best around here (I hope) is boil down Nortel’s news and activities into informative posts that add a little commentary and perspective.  We also give you insight into our executive’s thoughts through Q&A’s like this one, and we let you see what Nortel is doing at events and trade shows you might not be able to attend.  We also don’t mind having a little fun.

And most importantly, we interact with you.  I don’t think there is a single question that has been posted to this blog - no matter how tough - that we haven’t tried to answer.  We probably don’t satisfy everyone with all our answers, but it’s not for lack of effort.

So welcome to Buzzboard - and while you are here I’d be interested to know what your opinion is.  Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts - harsh or kind - or send me an email at bogowan@nortel.com