Netzwirt has been hosting my Weblog a couple of years until recently for free. For the InitMarketing website, I bought a dedicated server and meanwhile moved my Weblog to that other server.

Many thanks to Reto Gassmann of Netzwirt for the highly reliable hosting during the past years!

While at LinuxTag 2008, I met with Jure Kodzoman of Interchange fame. Interchange is a well established Open Source e-commerce platform, existing for over 12 years, and very popular in the USA.

We sat down to discuss from a marketing perspective the Interchange website and a brochure they created for distribution at their LinuxTag booth.

These are the issues I identified and some changes I proposed to Jure (which would still need some more consideration before being implemented):

1. The current domain name of the website (icdevgroup.org) is extremely hard to remember because it does not relate to the Interchange brand. The domain needs to be in sync with the project name, hence they should move the website to a domain that includes “interchange” in its name. It need not be a .com TLD, .org or .net suffice for a community-driven OSS project.
2. Today’s tagline ” Powering web-based applications since 1995″ does not tell that Interchange is an e-commerce platform nor that it is Open Source. Better taglines would be “The most flexible Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The first Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The Open Source Platform Powering E-commerce world-wide since 1995″. It’s a great selling point that Interchange exists since 1995 and it might be a valid claim that they are - yet another potential tagline - “The first Open Source Alternative for E-commerce”.
3. The Interchange website lacks a concise welcome blurb on the front page. This makes it very hard to visitors new to Interchange understand what it is about. A sample welcome blurb: “Interchange is powering e-commerce since 1995. Its proven and highly flexible open source platform provides the building blocks to assemble individual online shop solutions. Interchange can be easily configured to grow with your business.”
4. It is better to communicate only one major news on the front page through a banner especially to guide new visitors. For example, don’t advertise LinuxTag in one banner plus a general banner plus a banner about the Interchange 5.6 release in the same space. Instead, highlight the 5.6 release in a banner, provide a link to a landing page and at that landing page, say: “Come to LinuxTag and get a hands-on demo”.

Open Source companies can nicely take advantage of the positive effects of blogging: Markets are conversations. Weblogs are a powerful medium of communication, because they provide first-hand information about Open Source products. In a way, Weblogs even turn core developers into sales people, because with every blog entry they seamlessly sell the product to other developers.

Weblogs are an efficient way of learning how to non-obtrusively sell an Open Source product. The simple fact that a Weblog requires you to

• actually write down what you think
• take into account the interests of your target audience

lets Open Source bloggers start to think in terms of selling and marketing the product. With their Weblog, they go out there and show what the product is capable of doing and why they enjoy using it. Additionally, the way that Weblogs allow for interactive communication (e.g. via commenting functionality) creates a style of communication that is based on very similar principles like the underlying beliefs of successful sales.

Hence, you can use Weblogs to subtly coach employees of an Open Source company in learning how to effectively communicate to a larger audience. Weblogs will also foster the exchange of information within an Open Source company to raise understanding about the product. For example, a new employee might start blogging about the product and asks his colleagues for advice whenever unsure about some technical specifics. The pure fact that he does not want to make himself look like a fool when writing something wrong in his Weblog, will help clarify things for him, maybe also for other colleagues and the public.

Greg is right in claiming that there aren’t any hard and fast rules when it comes to best practices for coprorate blogging: “Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.” Which means that personality counts in blogging and I would add that this is also true for Open Source sales.

Given that Open Source companies can reach maximum distribution with a product freely available for download to anyone, blogging nicely aligns with this freeconomics approach, because it allows Open Source companies to reach their diverse world-wide target audience with information freely readable by anyone and to sell it non-obtrusively as well as cost-efficiently.

My talk entitled Marketing Open Source Software at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany was very well attended and the audience asked some great questions.

Find below the slides. I have added three more graphs related to Open Source business models to the slides deck I had used at previous presentations.

I have also uploaded the German slides of my presentation Marketing von Open-Source-Software at Webinale in Karlsruhe, Germany.