Shamelessly stolen from Robert Cartaino and edited somewhat heavily to work as an answer rather than an email, here's our usual stance on this sort of thing.

We get a lot of requests from project teams about how they can use Stack Exchange to support their communities. Stack Exchange works really well for technical support, as long as the company not trying to outsource their entire customer support channel to Stack Exchange.

We've had the best results from following the model used by Google Android to support their developers (Android Developers: Hello Stack Overflow!). Following their example, we've put together a few guidelines about how to use Stack Exchange for community support and where the boundaries on what we can endorse should ideally be placed:

• Stack Exchange should only be ONE of the options available. The company should have other resources for support apart from Stack Exchange. Issues like bug reporting, feature requests, generalized discussions, and specific customer support issues do not fit into our Q&A model, and will be quickly closed by the community.

• "Seeding" common questions about a product on Stack Exchange should be avoided. Our communities are very sensitive to this type of astroturfing, and they can react very negatively when a company seems to be posting staged questions simply to get them out there on Stack Exchange. Communities expect questions to represent actual problems asked in good faith from those who are actually seeking the help.

• While we have a very active community, there are some questions that can only be answered by one of the internal team members. The company should be prepared to jump on these quickly to establish their tag as THE place to get help with the harder questions.

• We offer various advertising options and tag sponsorships that could help drum up interest in whatever tag the company's monitoring, so any sort of promotional activity by the company's employees that's not directly related to solving whatever problem is described in the question should also be avoided.

With all that said, occasionally this does have the side-effect of sending regular customers to Stack Overflow as well. (I'm looking at you, Facebook.) Nitrous.io is a service aimed at developers, so I would expect most questions about it to be development-related. Looking through the nitrousio tag, that does appear to be the case.

Shamelessly stolen from Robert Cartaino and edited somewhat heavily to work as an answer rather than an email, here's our usual stance on this sort of thing.

We get a lot of requests from project teams about how they can use Stack Exchange to support their communities. Stack Exchange works really well for technical support, as long as the company not trying to outsource their entire customer support channel to Stack Exchange.

We've had the best results from following the model used by Google Android to support their developers (Android Developers: Hello Stack Overflow!). Following their example, we've put together a few guidelines about how to use Stack Exchange for community support and where the boundaries on what we can endorse should ideally be placed:

• Stack Exchange should only be ONE of the options available. The company should have other resources for support apart from Stack Exchange. Issues like bug reporting, feature requests, generalized discussions, and specific customer support issues do not fit into our Q&A model, and will be quickly closed by the community.

• "Seeding" common questions about a product on Stack Exchange should be avoided. Our communities are very sensitive to this type of astroturfing, and they can react very negatively when a company seems to be posting staged questions simply to get them out there on Stack Exchange. Communities expect questions to represent actual problems asked in good faith from those who are actually seeking the help.

• While we have a very active community, there are some questions that can only be answered by one of the internal team members. The company should be prepared to jump on these quickly to establish their tag as THE place to get help with the harder questions.

• We offer various advertising options and tag sponsorships that could help drum up interest in whatever tag the company's monitoring, so any sort of promotional activity by the company's employees that's not directly related to solving whatever problem is described in the question should also be avoided.

With all that said, occasionally this does have the side-effect of sending regular customers to Stack Overflow as well. (I'm looking at you, Facebook.) Nitrous.io is a service aimed at developers, so I would expect most questions about it to be development-related. Looking through the nitrousio tag, that does appear to be the case.