Tired and Happy

I have been running pretty hard these days - visiting people from publishing all across the states. This week, though, was a week where it all seemed to come together - for many reasons.

It was a busy few days traveling to visit publishers - from Alabama to Ohio to Kentucky. This was a great trip because I was able to visit a potential new client, but also to visit existing client for customer service calls. The travel was a bit hectic, but the trip was successful. The successes ranged from major milestones reached in ongoing projects, to a couple of small tweaks on Indesign catalog imports with our friends at Barbour.

I also have the pleasure of welcoming two new clients this week. First was Texas A&M Press who have signed on for the full contingent of our solutions - Title Management, Eloquence and Ecommerce - all hosted. We also signed off our project with David C. Cook in Colorado Springs and a member of the ECPA who will be implementing Title Management in our hosted environment along with the Eloquence service.

These additions to our community are very important to us - from a business standpoint and a personal standpoint.

But what struck me this week is that I simply like people in publishing. It is a pleasure establishing lasting relationships and friendships. It is enjoyable to see Firebrand in such a vibrant business position, but despite the necessity of this, what keeps me here is the simple fact that I enjoy working with the team at Firebrand and our community members.

So, as I close out a hectic week, on the heals of several hectic weeks (and another busy one next week), I simply want to say thank you to all whom I spoke with and met with this week - you know who you are!

AskBurnie and RSS Feed for Discussion Groups

We have been disappointed in the usage of our new discussion forums at our Firebrandz community site, although many users in the community have been asking for this tool. Not too surprising really - discussion forums are chicken and egg equations. You need activity to generate more activity, and we simply haven't accelerated yet. We have been building the community nicely though - with 140 vetted, qualified members, but that hasn't translated into discussion forum activity yet. We have had a very good response for our webinars and have seven new webinars scheduled as listed at Firebrand Events.

To boost activity on the forums, we just added an RSS feed, so that members can subscribe and see new posts. This can be found at http://www.firebrandz.com/phpBB3/rss.php. We have also added a new email that we will promote as one-stop shopping for all of our users - AskBurnie@FirebrandTech.com. Burnie will be happy to answer any questions, and relevant topics will be posted on the Discussion Forums.