The organizers of the J and Beyond Joomla! conference just published a video recording of my talk Marketing is for Geeks:

I am extremely happy to welcome Terri Molini on board of the Initmarketing team. She can certainly add a lot of value to Initmarketing’s Open Source corporate communications services, given her vast experience. Most notably, Terri was 13 years with Sun Microsystems where she lead all world-wide PR efforts related to Open Source. In July 2009, Terri launched the Open Source for America coalition. Good to have you on board Terri, this will be fun!

My talk Marketing is for Geeks has been accepted for J and Beyond, an international Joomla! event. I’ll be there Monday, May 31st. Let me know if you’d like to meet and don’t miss my talk from 12:15 to 13:15.

I am honestly proud of what the LinuxTag Program Committee achieved. The soon-to-be-announced program for this year’s event will have 25% more talks and even very interesting ones as well.

Keynote speakers such as Larry Augustin (CEO SugarCRM, Angel Investor) and Dirk Riehle (Germany’s first professor of Open Source Software) have already been announced. There are some more who have just confirmed their attendance, but I am not allowed to name them yet (surprise, surprise).

The committee has invested a lot of time pro-bono in directly contacting OSS projects and speakers and in evaluating talk proposals. Our goal was to make sure the program will feature some of the key projects and persons, providing a mix of introductory as well as advanced topics, technical as well as business-related talks. I am sure you will appreciate the program once it has been published at www.linuxtag.org within the next couple of days.

Kudos to my fellows at the program committee and thanks for bringing me in, it’s just so much fun! Many thanks also to everyone who proposed a talk!

I am very happy to welcome Annie Blandel on board. She lives in Southern France and is a senior-level marketing manager with a bunch of experience and expertise.

Entrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie’s 25 year career in technology marketing. She has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP.

She is furthermore a professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

Read more about Annie on the Initmarkteing team page.

Bienvenue Annie!

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an opportunity for Open Source?
• More real-life case studies on how OSS is being used in mission-critical scenarios.
• A European or global perspective on Open Source in Public Administration.
• How to make use of Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine with Open Source apps?
• Technical tutorials for beginners, especially for building Web apps (e.g. PHP/Ruby/Java/etc. for beginners).
• High performance Web environments with Open Source tools
• Security in the Cloud
• What’s the status of some of the regional Linux distributions?

I can’t promise that your talk will be accepted if it covered one of the above topics. The review process is of course a joint effort of the whole Program Committee. Anyway, it’s definitely worth a try. Of course, any other topic I did not think of is also highly welcome.

Go here to submit your LinuxTag proposal.

Open Source software vendors outside of the U.S. or UK tend to make a fatal strategic mistake: They sacrifice international marketing communications at the altar of a regional sales focus.

For example, an Open Source business started in Spain will naturally feel more comfortable with doing sales in Spain with most employees speaking and thinking in Spanish. Spain is where our sample company comes from, it’s a safe haven, and it’s where the bulk of sales are being made. Why should they go global, invest in building an international business and take the risk?

Sooner or later, there will be global competition in the same niche from another Open Source vendor or project. Someone else will reach a critical mass of international community and business adoption much quicker than the Spanish company will ever be able within its country of origin. And then our sample vendor will find itself against a much stronger competitor who isn’t afraid to take risks.

Essentially, Open Source vendors must think of themselves as global and look at regions as regions, and not the other way round.

In order to do this well, English should be the main language of communication with the public right from the start. Make sure all general marketing collateral is first available in English. This will make English and an international point of view part of the company’s DNA from the beginning, which is critical for success.

Independently, it is of course important to note that in some regions you will only be able to attract early adopters by communicating in English. Pragmatist buyers in countries such as France or Germany will appreciate if your sales stuff spoke French or German and related marketing collateral were available in their native language. This trend of early adopters willing to try out English-only products while mainstream users wait for the product to mature, allows for easy and free market research. If the early adopters in a region start using and talking about your project and you were able to win a few prestigious customers, it is time to consider localizing there.

So, don’t make this mistake, thinking like a regional Open Source vendor that goes global. Rather think like an international company focusing its sales efforts towards certain regions.

Looking at this from another perspective, I never understood discussions whether MySQL (for example) is a European or US company? Trying to link banner Open Source vendors with national or regional pride is totally neglecting the fact that Open Source is and always has been a global business.

Please shell out a few minutes to help the IKS Project identify business needs for semantic CMS by participating in a survey. The results will help the EU-funded project to work towards an Open Source interactive knowledge stack.

There are two different sets of questions, depending on your background:

• IT Executives of CMS Vendors
• IT Executives of CMS End User Companies

Thanks for participating in the survey and please spread the word!

I’ve just published an article that explains how a PHP-based product can gain a good position in the market and be made appealing to customers by using marketing communication. The focus is on products licensed under an Open Source license. Yet, most of the recommendations also apply to proprietary offerings.

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.