Tyndale OT and NT Commentaries

Hi everyone, my name is Dan Pritchett. 

I am the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, (yes “Bob’s brother”), and while you may not see my name pop up in the forums or newsgroups, I have actually been stalking the newsgroups and forums since they have been in place. ...and if you have ever read a “Logos NewsWire” you’ve been hearing from me for years, since I have written about 90% of every NewsWire we have ever sent.  [:D]

As you may have noticed, I try to stay far away from jumping into the newsgroups or forums as much as humanly possible. I find that usually every issue that comes up takes care of itself—and I am sure you would rather I spent my time making sure we were putting out more titles, than jumping into every topic here. Even writing this post puts me in danger of being pulled into future discussions... but I decided to make a special exception tonight. Maybe because there is so much of my name on this topic, maybe because I am working late on a Saturday night and I don't have any sense not to jump in, maybe because I do feel that this is an important topic to weigh in on before it gets out of hand.

First, let me say that I need to respect the president's wishes in everything as much as I can (while still realizing that I can take him in a wrestling match, can you say “noogie, noogie, noogie?”).

Bob has made it abundantly clear that he hates policies. To be 100% honest, I love them! This is something we wrestle with all the time. As you can imagine it is a challenge to implement Bob's vision for this while all the time I am screaming inside wishing I could set policy.

This is a perfect case and point. There is no list of "rules" for the forums. I really want one. Really. Really, really, really want one. ...but I can't have it, and I have to live with that. ...and if I have to live with that, you do too... [:D]

Without creating rules, let me just give you a few things to think about.

We love our customers.

Everyone in our company has a mandate to provide the best customer service in the universe.

We try hard to make as many customers as possible happy. Will we fail? Yes. 100% guaranteed. There is no way to make everyone happy all the time, but we really try hard.

We are very responsive to feedback. We listen to our customers more than just about any company you can think of, and as we continue to grow, we have made it a priority to continue to find ways to not outgrow our customer-centric focus. We have almost 200 employees now, and yet still the President, Vice President and almost the entire staff are constantly listening to feedback and reachable by anyone. How many companies our size can say the same?

Our desire to limit rules and policies is not only a business philosophy that Bob feels strongly about, it is a testament to the godly character of our user base and their desire to live biblically. With the Bible as their guide the need for our rules or policies is dramatically reduced.

For those of you who hate the forums, sorry. I am the one to blame.  [:D] Understanding this move to forums will help you see why I got my trigger finger all over the delete button today. At the risk of turning this into a new discussion on forums vs. newsgroups let me explain, and leave it at that.

I love Internet marketing, SEO, SMO, and all things related to making sure as many people as possible discover Logos Bible Software and become customers for life. The move to forums can help more of our customers get information, support, and information about our software, but it also does some very important things for us in terms of search engine optimization. By creating a large body of content all related to our product and our category, we are increasing the likelihood that a relevant search on the Internet will turn up a result for our site.

In exchange for this benefit we had to expose our entire user contributed content base to the world. In the old days of newsgroups it was bad form to use our newsgroup to promote the competition, and we would from time to time chime in and suggest that it would be kinder not to use our own group as a way to enrich our competition. However, bad form as it may be it was easy to not get too upset about it because in the newsgroup there was no permanent web-based home for the links or even the comments.

In the forums, it is a totally new ballgame. A post in the forums has the potential to live forever. Exposed to searches, views, casual reading, topic threads, and most importantly—the algorithms that the search engines use to rank every site in the world. Without going into a course on SEO, link building strategies, Google PR, weight, and context relevance and anchor text optimization, let me just say that the main reason I do not like links to the competition is due to how that impacts the search engines for us and particularly for them.

Aside from the complicated SEO reasons, just think for a moment about posting about or linking to the competition in general. Here are a few analogies:

Mentioning the name of a competitor on our newsgroup and suggesting people go buy the product there is like walking into McDonalds and telling every customer that Burger King has burgers too, and they should go there sometime.

Posting a link to the competition on our newsgroup is like going into the same McDonalds and telling people you have a bus in the parking lot ready to take them to Burger King right now, and for those that can’t make the bus or who aren’t in McDonalds at that moment you have installed a moving walkway that will permanently be located at the McDonalds’ cash register which will whisk people away to Burger King instead. Right next to the moving walkway you install a billboard for Burger King just in case they don’t see the moving walkway.  [:D]

Okay, that was a lot of fun for my own entertainment—yes, and I know at least one person reading this will be chomping at the bit to pick apart my analogy, but the point is—it is not just about mentioning that we live in a free market, it is actually finding a way to encourage our customers who are gathering in our place of business to leave our business and go elsewhere. In some cases to buy the exact same thing we are selling, and in other cases, to spend money on other things that they might have spent with us. Either way, not exactly over the top nice.

Are there forum rules? Nope. I wish there were, but there aren’t. Does Logos own the forums and control and care deeply about what is posted there, what is edited, and what is deleted? Yes. We are trying to be as open and transparent as possible. There are all kinds of things posted on the forums that we would prefer not to have posted there, and we don’t want to play “Big Brother”.  At the same time, we hope our users will respect the fact that they are posting on our site and try to have a little mercy, grace, and patience with us. This topic aside, just from years of reading the newsgroups and now forums, we are a very passionate company that really does care about the relationship we have with our customers, and it hurts to see people demanding answers, asserting “rights”, questioning our ethics, and making huge leaps and assumptions when we don’t instantly address an issue that they have decided was important enough for us to drop everything we are doing and give full disclosure of private business matters, relationships, contracts, marketing plans…

We cannot always respond to questions, and I am sure you can understand how painful it must be to watch people drag our name through the mud while we are forced to silently watch and listen. There have been times when we have been told by lawyers representing a publisher that we were not allowed to say why we pulled a product for example. We were ordered not to even address the issue, and it was more painful than you can imagine to watch people accuse us of all manner of evil and use our own channels of communication against us. That really hurt.

In the case of the Tyndale Commentaries here, I am sure it must be very confusing, because there is a Libronix edition, and we are actually producing the product in our building here (although IVP-UK is “boxing” it). Why have we not addressed the issue! I can’t tell you right now, and that is frustrating, but I can tell you that if you keep watching the pre-pub page you will see it soon.

Well, it is almost 12:30 AM and I am really tired from a long evening of work, I am sure due to the hour I may have said more or less than intended or prudent, but I hope you understand our heart. We love you, we listen to you, we want to be there for you for the rest of our lives and the rest of yours. We have given everything to this endeavor and we will fight to make sure you can continue to grow nearer and dearer to God through the study of His precious revealed Word with everything we do.

One final note:

At the time of writing, there are still several posts on this thread that mention the competition, accuse Logos of bad behavior, threaten us, and are generally unkind. I considered helping everyone start with a clean slate by blowing away the thread, replying to Scott’s first post with “Yeah, check the pre-pub page next week” and leaving it at that… but I wanted to swallow my pride and my hurt feelings and allow each individual to determine for themselves which comments they felt like leaving in place and which they wanted to delete, after all… there are no rules on the forums.  

-Dan 

Dan Pritchett, VP Marketing & Business Development
Logos Research Systems, Inc.
1313 Commercial St., Bellingham WA 98225-4307
Voice (360) 685-2335 FAX (360) 527-1707  dan@logos.com
http://www.logos.com