After nine years and three months, today is my last day at AOL. It's been a wild ride, lots of fun, and a tremendous learning experience. Besides working with such great folks, where else could one have the opportunity to run such a large community operation and get to know some of the most interesting, savvy, and committed community members in the world? I will miss you, more than you know.

But... other opportunities, both personal and professional have been calling and the time is right for me to move on.

My AOL e-mail box will not work after today, so if you want to stay in touch, feel free to write to NYMeng@aol.com. You can also keep track of my daily activities by reading Hummingbird Mind.

Before you ask what I'll do with myself, I have some plans. Here's just a short list:

* Sleep
* Exercise
* Read
* Play with my new granddaughter
* Fish with my father
* Walk the beach
* Focus on the youth oriented non profit I started last year with some other parents
* Take many road trips
* Complete a book I've been writing

That's just a start. I plan to take off at least a month before starting some consulting work I've been offered.

I'll also still visit AOL communities, so if you see me online, feel free to ping me.

It's not goodbye, it's so long and see you soon.

-Nancie

P.S. Be good!

Thanks to Will Kern for his 15Meanings blog post on Being Transparent. As corporate bloggers, my team talks about the ups and downs of transparency a lot. As Will states, "It seems easy enough, but is is harder than one might think." (In the spirit of transparency and full disclosure, Will is a colleague and Senior Product Manager here at AOL).

I wager that most corporate bloggers believe that the benefits for the company and the consumer outweigh the problems in most instances. But, the downside is worth thinking about.

Like Will, my team and I will answer any questions as long as we've got the information and are "in a position to give it to you." Please note the key phrases here:

* If we have the information
* If we are in a position to give it to you

On topics over which we have input or control, we're comfortable with being as transparent as possible. And, thankfully, many individuals and groups outside of MESH at AOL keep us informed by reaching out. That enables us to share upcoming changes, new features or other news you all may find useful or even essential.

But, my team's willingness to be up-front and serve as "messaging central" for other groups can make it hard for our customers to know when we're talking just about our areas of responsibilities and when we're just the messengers for others. You know what they do with messengers, right?

Here are some of the realities we work under (and I don't think we're unique):

* Dependencies: Remember the people I mentioned who keep us in the loop? A lot of others don't. People are very busy and in a huge organization it can be hard to know who to involve and when. That's a challenge we can continue to work on.
* Surprises: Sometimes we are as surprised as our customers are. How many times has one of our community users written to say, "What happened to [insert feature here]?" or "Did you know that [insert product here] isn't working?" or "When did they roll out the new version of [insert product here]?" only to have one of us respond, "I don't know. We'll look into it."
* Proprietary Info: Sometimes there are business reasons why we do not or cannot share something.

In the situations I've outline, individuals on my team are often accused of lying, stupidity or not caring. We roll with the punches in those situations because it comes with the territory of customer service. And, we know, especially in the area of community, that people are passionate about their interests and their friends online.

A challenge for us and others is to take employees whose main jobs do not involve customer interaction or messaging and convince them of the value of talking with users early and often. There is always the issue of time. There is also the concern about the potential for negative customer feedback.

This is a big question we'll revisit time and again. For now, what would you identify as the biggest obstacle to corporate transparency?

Over the weekend, a friend sent the following meme to me. It seemed like a nice and lazy way to spend a Sunday morning, so I spent some time filling it out and then e-mailed it on. It occurred to me that blog memes are a great topic, so I decided to post it here as an example, with my answers. When I completed it, the Safety Muse spoke to me:

You are not modeling safe online behavior.

Damn. Caught again. I reviewed my answers and sure enough, though I might be comfortable with some of the things I wrote, I had not been very wise in the context of safe sharing. And though I'm willing to take the hits for what I reveal about myself, I do not want you to reveal information that you shouldn't. I edited my answers using the following strategy:

* Answer only the question asked -- don't elaborate. The devil loves the details.
* When supplying details make sure they don't matter or reveal too much about you or others you know.
* Don't use last names.
* Don't use cities, states or countries.
* Don't use the names, ages or other identifying info about your children or anyone else's.

To the safety muse: How's that?

Did my strategy suck the fun out of this exercise? I don't think so, but you tell me. Here's more than you'll ever want to know about me:

[Click Read More to read the meme and my answers.]

Monday evening, my 19-year-old daughter logged onto the Web moments after they wheeled her up from recovery after her mandibular osteotomy and connected her to all the tubes in her hospital room.

First, she signed on to AOL.com to check e-mail. Then she logged on to MySpace and Facebook. No, she didn't bring her laptop. The room was equipped with a wireless keyboard and full Internet access. Her father and I watched in amazement, but my eyesight wasn't good enough to peek at her MySpace page.

"Hospitals have sure changed," her father muttered, shaking his head. I think it's great. The child can't talk for at least a week as her mouth is wired shut, so the phone is out. She can keep up with her life without missing a beat.

We brought her home yesterday, and this afternoon I watched teenage social networking up close. Two of her friends dropped by with the obligatory flowers, balloons and lots of sympathy. They watched as I asked if she needed anything and waited as she wrote out her response. I left them alone and then tried to finish my blog entry. Within two minutes, Jeremy came out and said that my daughter wanted to tell me something.

"What do you need, Sweetie?" I asked. She began typing and a voice emanated from her laptop.

"I wanted to thank you and may I have some ginger ale?" the voice said. She smiled as much as she could through her jaw bra.

Let's face it. Kids don't have the patience to wait for the patient to write out all her responses. So, in this case, they just took matters in their own hands and found some assistive technology right on her laptop's control panel under Sounds, Speech and Audio Devices. Who knew?

You have to be impressed. They hooked her up with some text to voice software. After all, she can type like the dickens... almost as fast as she can talk. This will come in handy. She can answer the phone now, too, which is a help, even if it's just to say:

"I'm sorry. I can't help. Whom may I say is calling?"

or

"Sure. I will buzz you in."

Last I heard they were Googling celebrity voices she could swap in and out. I wonder if George Clooney is available.