Happy New Year - and a resolution

A new year and new resolutions. They seem to have a similar theme - get fit, get better at my job, and do more for charity. Don't have a particularly good record at achieving them, but I see it as a war of attrition - in the long run I'll grind them down. This year i added one - do more blogging. It's not much a resolution, but it's one of the things I enjoy, and if anyone else benefits, that's a bonus.

Now as my New Year resolution suggestion to the rest of Nokia, I'll propose one -- get better at listening, in particular to our expert users. It's sometimes hard when things are moving so fast, in particular as we're trying to come up with new services ideas at the speed of those nimble startups, but i really think a lot of the time we can save ourselves pain and expense by listening more. Here's a case in point - this is a round table chat by a bunch of Nokia-focused external bloggers that was held at Nokia world in Amsterdam in December.

Carlo Longino pointed me to this, and it's quite fascinating hearing people talk with passion, knowledge and plenty of opinion about our range of products and services. As Carlo said in his email, "I know Nokia does tons of research on its customers and users, but I thought this was a good example of how social-media marketing isn't just about spreading the word about a company's products, but can also be turned around and harnessed by the company to help it build better products."

I think this is a great example of really valuable insights from some of our expert users that we can harness - for free. Let's hope that Charlie and his new team of Nokia bloggers and social media gurus harness the outboard brains of these guys, and work out how to turn their insights into new products and service innovations, rather than just convince more people to buy the current stuff.

Happy New Year to one and all. Looking forward to talking a bit more and listening a lot more.