News on iMatch2018?

[ben]

Hi Mario,

the community is quite calm at the moment.
How is your progress with iMatch 2018?

Ben

[Mario]

Thanks for asking. Progress is as expected, for both IMatch 2018 and IMatch Anywhere™ 2018.
Lots of infrastructure and framework code to build, for the future.

If you keep an eye on my Sneak Peak posts in this board, you'll be pretty much up to date.

[Jingo]

Hi Mario,

the community is quite calm at the moment.
How is your progress with iMatch 2018?

Ben

I too thought something was wrong with the site... quiet the last week or so... miss the acitvity!

[Mario]

Vacation time?

Users use IMatch without running into problems?
Usually users don't post "Hey, IMatch is still working", they only post when they have questions or complaints 

This is a big problem for me, actually. How to reach or 'involve' users...?

+ Email is complex and risky. Too many technical hurdles, SPAM filters, bounce-back quotas, SPAM blocks etc.
(It's easier for the big companies, because the major SPAM filters have exceptions for specific mail servers from Google, FB, Microsoft, Adobe etc.)

+ Many users have disabled the "Allow us to reach you via email" option in the customer portal. These users are unreachable for me.

+ About 50% of the emails I send during an announcement end up in SPAM filters. Sometimes I get a bounce-back, most of the time I don't know. Hence I send everything at least two or 3 times, once per week.

+ Only a few hundred users follow me on Facebook / Twitter.

The majority of users does not follow this community or post. Users who are happy with IMatch are unlikely to ever post here or follow the posts.

I only learn about users when I get emails from IMatch 3.x or IMatch 5 users who have problems and did not even know that IMatch 2017 is out, that they have missed their discounted upgrades etc.

I'm no exception myself. When I buy a software which just does what it is supposed to do, I don't join the user forum or subscribe to the email newsletter of that company.

Satisfied users are silent...

[Jingo]

Updating the website Blog with interesting stuff weekly or more often?  Perhaps inviting users to "share their workflow" or "Tip of the Day!"?  Would be interesting to know what the user base of IMatch is compared to the "typical" users that regularly contribute to the forum... I have always understood the user base to be quite large from your posts... but form the community involvement - it feels  smaller.

In any event - you are correct that most folks don't post unless they have a problem... human nature!

[Mario]

Updating the website Blog with interesting stuff weekly or more often?

I don't really blog. No time.
And about what? Yet another blog site which repeats the agency messages about new photo gear...?
Writing tutorials or making training videos is a very time-consuming process. I do that when I find the time.

If you have a written IMatch tutorial or workflow article, feel free to post in in the corresponding board here. If you allow me to publish it and I like it, I can add it to the KB.

Most IMatch users don't even know about the knowledge base or have ever used it. And when I send a user a link to an IMatch video tutorial by email, they are surprised about my tutorials and YouTube presence. When I ask them when they visited photools.com the last time, they tell me "Years ago".

I can tell by comparing the number of sales and the number of community registrations that most users are not participating. Probably too much going on these days already.

Adobe, Google and the other big players spend lots of money on "social engineering" teams which fill their web sites, Facebook, Instagram and other public outlets with a constant stream of content. Generating a high level of buzz end user entanglement. All for the sake of search engines and their users. I cannot do that.

[Carlo Didier]

...Probably too much going on these days already...

Exactly! Between several forums, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Instagram and whatnot, I'm always getting weary quite quickly. I have an offline life which doesn't allow me to spend several hours each day with social media ... Wonder how some people do it.

[Jingo]

...Probably too much going on these days already...

Exactly! Between several forums, Facebook, Youtube, Netflix, Instagram and whatnot, I'm always getting weary quite quickly. I have an offline life which doesn't allow me to spend several hours each day with social media ... Wonder how some people do it.

I understand.. but running a small business takes a lot of work from many different angles (believe me - I know) and putting on a lot of different hats each day... website upkeep, social media presence, forums... and then developing the product... when one falls down it can have an impact on another.  No easy solution.. but I do know that having your product "out there" makes a huge difference in sales and viability.