Resources

• How to setup a BC User Group in your area

Video Transcript

Brent:: Hey. This is Brent Weaver from BCGurus.com. I'm here today with Jackson Palmer of Adobe and the BC Team. Welcome to BC Gurus.

Jackson: Thanks and hi everybody.

Brent:: We are just following up a couple of days of the Business Catalyst Conference in Sydney. It's been reallly awesome couple of days of networking with partners. It's really good stuff.

Jackson: Yeah. It's been awesome, man. We had well over 200 partners in attendance on the first day followed by over 50 on the second social day event so there was a great effort from everybody and thanks to everyone who attended.

Brent:: Yeah, I think one of my biggest takeaways from the partner conference was that there is over 200 partners, and everybody seemed to have a little bit of a different angle on their business and how they use view BC Partnership type of things that they're bringing to the community. It was really diverse and I really enjoyed the presentations. I think there's a lot of ground covered.

Jackson: Yeah. I think definitely big ops to all presenters that were able to go up there and strut their stuff. I think we had a perfect kind of blend about technical versus growing your business kind of advice. I think there's a lot to take away for everybody that attended.

Brent:: Absolutely. So what was your biggest takeaway from the conference? Like was there that just jumped out at you?

Jackson: The big takeaway for me was there's a really passionate community there and in Tim Gentle's presentation one of the things that he was really pushing is we have the community, we just have to make sure we grow it together and try to educate one another, so sharing advice like technical advice or advice about growing your business. I think it's there, we just need to come together more often and through different channels and educate one another.

Brent:: Absolutely. I think Tim's presentation, he had a really good angle of viewing the world in terms of kind of abundance. There was plenty of business for everybody and if we just were able to contribute to each other then we'd all come out ahead which I think was really cool. There's another community issues that are going on, I think both in the United States and maybe as we're looking to get those moving here in Australia.

Jackson: Yeah. So one of the big things that came out of yesterday I think was a lot of people were saying "Hey. I've got another partner that's just down the road from me." So now we've got people I know in Melbourne and in Perth that are talking about starting up user groups and user groups are a great way of getting together your local BC partners. Whether there's five or ten of you in your local area and having a, say, a monthly meeting. And that's definitely something that we're talking about doing in the future. Having Adobe sponsored events organized by the user groups. It's really important that if you know a bunch of partners in your local area that get together and fill out the, we have some phones on the BC blog and you can get started with these groups.

Brent:: Nice. We're actually did our first user group in Denver. Had about 20 people show up for that so it's definitely primarily partner focused but I think we're looking to see if we can get more small business owners and more diverse group of people in Denver. So I can definitely encourage partners across the world to start forming those groups because I think the more of those that exist, the better the types of conferences that we just had will be. Have more great content to bring to the table. That kind of brings up the idea of being a Business Catalyst partner. I mean, how is that changing? How is Adobe changing, how is that reviewing the partner program and what's the future of that?

Jackson: Yeah. I think someone we've really wanted to do this years and it's been a goal of mine and a goal of any of the other members is to revisit the partner program and the value that we offer to our standard and premium partners and make sure that we continue offering that value. So be it via priority support, what we do in terms of white labeling just providing you with rebrandable materials that you can use in attracting clients. So that's something that for the next six months we're going to really revisit and by the end of the year we're hoping we're going to come back with a revisited partner program, which in turn kind of includes a revisited partner portal, as well. Kind of a rethinking of the whole way you manage your BC sites and how we help you as partners.

Brent:: Very cool, very good to know that. So I know we had a big, I guess, a big hurdle. It's been jumped over in the last month. Has been create a cloud. How has that affected the partner base and the BC community at large?

Jackson: So we've just gone through months of infrastructure work to make sure that we're ready for the creative cloud, and we've seen a really great response to the creative cloud. And what that means for the BC community is that we're seeing a lot of creative professionals coming through via Dream Weaver or through Muse, and really kind of engaging with the platform. And what that means is that we have a stronger creative professional community behind business catalyst and hopefully that means we can grow against like we had over the past few days and also share more, share the education between partners.

Brent:: And I've been excited to see integration because I've used all those creative tools, which hopefully help the actual production of this type of client work for every single BC partner. I think the new CS6 stuff in Dream Weaver is pretty exciting. I think Muse for most BC partners are kind of like one foot out of the water. Like what does this mean for the community? That kind of stuff. But I think that's a totally different group of people that are using Business Catalyst and I think that in the end it will be better for everybody. So as far as the platform goes, I know now that the creative cloud hump is kind of done, it's time to get back and focus on BC as a product. I've heard this term of "web publishing", that's kind of the feature. What's next for that?

Jackson: I think when we think about web publishing, we think really nailing down the process of publishing pages online, but also taking that through blogging and photo galleries and some of the things that really make up just your basic website. I mean, the essentials, if you will. And so what we really want to do this year is build on what we've already gone forth in V3 and offer a really intuitive, easy to use side editing experience for your small business owner clients, to replace what we currently have. Also at the same time, back that up with some really rich tools to developers out there to edit their pages and build templates faster.

Brent:: Very cool. When I hear about developer tools, web platform, development, that kind of stuff, definitely gets really exciting, but definitely looking forward to seeing that stuff start come into fruition, so it's good stuff. So is there anything to takeaway? What can partners start doing now to really participate in the community? I think the last couple of days has been all about community so I feel like I want to focus a lot about that, about how we push the community further.

Jackson: Definitely. As I said, it's one thing that kind of shone through was that there's a ton of passionate partners out there. We just need to come together and i think forming these user groups is a great way to do that. It brings together like-minded individuals and businesses, and you can share your knowledge and really help everybody grow together. So, as I said earlier, jump on the BC blog. There's some application forms and everything you need to get started with these groups, and so say you want to start one in your own state or your own city. It's a great way to just get involved

Brent:: Very cool. We'll definitely link to that in our blog post and we definitely appreciate you taking the time to hang with us today, Jackson.

Jackson: No worries.

Brent:: The Australians have an amazing sense of hospitality. everything from lots of drinking to lawn bowling and good times so we appreciate you guys having us here.

Jackson: Happy to have you.

Brent:: Stay tuned for more content from BC Gurus.com