Web sites of community-driven Open Source project are gradually becoming more professional and “marketing savvy” in their presentation. Earlier, many of these sites would be presented in a rather technical style, with lots of code and API examples and basic design. This was of course done deliberately, with the idea of highlighting technical benefits and thereby capturing the attention of developers who would then become interested in, and contribute to, the project.

However, this has begun to change. Many Open Source projects are now dialing back the technical approach, focusing instead on a more professional overview of the project and clear categorization of content for users, developers and partners. In other words, these projects have now matured (or hope to mature) to the point where they also wish to gain traction with other members of the Open Source community, such as end-users or companies who might want to partner with or sponsor the project.

Tech Talk vs. Marketing Lingo

To illustrate what I mean, let’s compare the sites of two popular CMS projects, TYPO3 and Midgard. Both are currently in the process of relaunching their websites, which makes it easy to analyze how their marketing and communications has developed over time.

Midgard Web site as of today.

Relaunch of Midgard Web site (under development).

Midgard’s Web site is all about the code. For example, the home page focuses on developer benefits of Midgard, such as its rapid development tools for Web services and its data sharing capabilities. The home page also specifies the technologies used by Midgard, and provides links to developer tools such as the source code repository, issue tracker, mailing lists and other developer tools. Even the items in the news feed mostly focus on recent software releases.

In short, this is a site by developers and for developers, and while it does provide some information for other members of the community, it’s the developer focus that stands out most strongly.

TYPO3.org Web site as of today.

Relaunch of typo3.org (under development).

TYPO3′s Web site is less developer-oriented and broader and more inclusive in its scope (disclaimer: my company Initmarketing has previously worked with TYPO3, although not on its Website). Web site content is clearly categorized for users, developers, decision-makers and community members; this offers a way for TYPO3 to position itself appropriately for each class of visitor. The navigation shows the different entry points into the project – for example, as an extension developer, writer, translator, sponsor – and there’s also an extension repository, which also serves a barometer of project activity.

In short, although this is an Open Source project that hopes to attract community developers, it moves the code and technical details one level down so that it is also attractive to other community members, such as end-users, and corporate sponsors. Note that it’s not only the messaging though, it’s also the visual design where they differ and which makes the new TYPO3 website appear more professional. Needless to say that this all has a huge impact on how the two brands will be perceived by prospective users.

GNOME 3.0 microsite.

Another example of this marketing-oriented trend can be seen on the new GNOME 3.0 Web site. It’s attractively presented, and its home page focuses almost exclusively on end-user benefits … even though it’s obviously a community-driven software project that also needs to attract developers. As with TYPO3, the idea here seems to be to make the project more accessible, by highlighting non-technical benefits and thereby increasing end-user adoption. And that’s very much “marketing” thinking!

Some Lessons

If you have an Open Source project, there are some lessons in this for you.

For your project to succeed, you must attract the attention of the community. While you certainly need developers to adopt your project, it’s also important that you cater to end-users, because

1. the more you highlight user and business benefits,
2. the more potential users will get the impression that your community understands their needs and
3. the more successful the project is in the user space,
4. the more motivated developers are to contribute.

Marketing is useful here, because that’s what it’s good at: presenting and positioning your project in the best possible light to different user segments.

This doesn’t mean that your project site shouldn’t display any code; rather, it means that the code needn’t be up-front, but can be located a level or two down in the navigation tree, perhaps in a specific section for developers.

At the same time, there are also companies who might want to sponsor your project, or individuals who might want to contribute to it with money or time donations. Don’t ignore these user segments; instead, make sure that your project site has useful information for all of them – for example, ways to contribute, benefits of becoming a sponsor, areas where non-programming help is needed – and make sure they feel valued and necessary to the overall success of the project.

The more inclusive and all-rounded your project Web site, the more likely you are to achieve broad marketplace adoption … and that’s where the rewards really lie!

No Positioning?

You might have noticed by looking at the screenshots that none of the websites have a tagline or slogan in the header – except for the current Midgard site, which indicates the product category: “Open Source Content Management Framework”. This means that all of the above projects neglect a strong opportunity for a unique positioning and branding.

I wonder what are the reasons? Is it too hard for community-driven projects to decide on the positioning or a tagline because the software is being used in very different ways? Or because the community’s decision-making processes are ineffective? Or does the community believe that its project is widely known and thus won’t need a tagline?

Perhaps this is a field where OSS projects still need to mature marketing-wise.

One of the questions I commonly hear from clients is, “Why do we need a marketing strategy? We already have [a PR agency/a Google Adwords campaign/a Facebook presence] that’s working for us, so what’s the point in spending time and money on this?”

In this blog post, I’d like to shed some light on this topic, listing some key reasons why every firm, especially (but not only) if it has an Open Source product, should take pains to create a marketing strategy for its offering. In my experience, this is one of the most critical activities a firm should undertake, and it invariably pays dividends over the long run.

After all, the most valuable asset of Open Source is open conversations that bring together users/buyers and vendors. Your firm should speak with a consistent voice to establish a strong and credible brand.

Understand Where You Are

To be successful in any business, a firm needs actionable, accurate intelligence about the marketplace. The typical marketing strategy will perform a thorough analysis of the firm’s current internal and external environment, thereby giving the firm an accurate snapshot of the status quo and key market trends. Strategic tools like SWOT analysis, market segmentation, and competitor arrays ensure that the firm has a good idea of where it stands vis-à-vis competitors, and offer some ideas about its unique strengths and advantages.

For firms that are creating a marketing strategy for the first time, this information is typically a major eye-opener. For example, the analytical output of the strategy document may help them realize that they’re competing against the wrong firms, or trying to attract the wrong type of users for their product. Performing this analysis may also throw up opportunities they hadn’t been aware of in the past.

Create Consistent Behavior

If a firm has a medium- to large-size marketing department and/or if it works with multiple outsourced agencies, a marketing strategy ensures consistent behavior across members, departments and third-party agencies. A marketing strategy clearly identifies the positioning of the firm and, by extension, its key competitors and target segments. This information keeps different arms of the same organization on the same page, ensuring that all work together on a common goal and mission.

So, for example, if the strategy identifies developers as a key segment, salespeople will know they need a technical sales script, PR agencies will know they need to pitch articles to developer journals, and copy writers will know that Website copy should identify developer benefits. Similarly, partners know which clients are best suited to the firm’s solutions, and will not recommend it to prospects who don’t match the profile.

Optimize the Marketing Mix

A marketing strategy will also help a firm optimize its marketing mix. Every marketing strategy will examine the classic “Four Ps” of marketing along with some additional Ps that are especially important in Open Source community marketing (participation, peer-to-peer, personalization, …), and this examination, coupled with the market analysis and trends, will help the firm better understand what it is marketing, and how it is doing so. For example, based on the SWOT analysis, a firm might refine its existing product/service offering (eg. a product specifically for PHP developers) to better play to its strengths, or it might review existing trends and thereby determine new delivery methods (eg. SaaS) that it can utilize to reduce its distribution cost and extend its reach.

Monitor Progress and Build Business Intelligence

Creating a marketing strategy is, in essence, a process of “writing things down”. The strategy developer is creating a journal or log of data, drawing conclusions from it, and then making operational recommendations. At the same time, he or she is also recording the results of previous recommendations. There are two key outcomes from this:

• The strategy document works as a measurable checklist, allowing the marketing team to have a written record of planned high-level actions and thereby measure marketing progress and success. By listing and prioritizing marketing activities, it works as an action plan for the marketing manager or marketing department, helping them to organize marketing activities in an organized, systematic manner and with sound rationales and goals for each activity.
• It serves as a “living document” of what worked, and what didn’t, thereby avoiding costly mistakes in the future. So, for example, if the strategy recommended attending a particular trade fair, but real-world analysis after the event showed a negative cost/benefit ratio, it serves as a flag to tell the marketer to consider dropping the event in the following year. As such, this written record adds to the collective knowledge of the firm and helps it learn from its mistakes.

Conclusion

It might be self-evident that as an Open Source marketing consultant, I would advise any Open Source organization to build and implement a marketing strategy (after all, this is how I earn my money). However, the fact remains that in my experience, this is never a wasted effort and the long-term benefits are significant, both in keeping the firm on track to meet its long-term goals and in giving the top management a tool or framework to define the evolution of the product.

For a firm with an Open Source product, making the software available for no cost is a great way to build a community around it and foster bottom-up adoption. However, this is just the beginning: the firm still faces the challenge of monetizing the product, converting intangible assets such as “Open Source freedom” and “community goodwill” into real money that can be used to fund further product development and community building activities.

In a previous blog post, I discussed one possible strategy for monetization: a modules marketplace for open source products. However, this isn’t the only approach. At Initmarketing, we developed a distribution model to help identify distribution channels for commercial open source that add value and provide a way to put a price tag on elements of the commercial offerings (products, modules, and services).

Understanding The Model

This model explores three facets of distribution: product/service offering, delivery method and distribution channel:

• The Offering column lists the firm’s available market offerings. These could be different flavors of its product(s), product plug-ins and extensions, and related services such as consulting, training or technical support.
• The Delivery Method column lists all the available delivery methods for the firm’s offerings. For Open Source software, the most common method is usually online delivery, but some products and services (eg. training) may also be delivered directly at the customer’s premises. Many firms also choose to make their products available as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
• The Channel column describes the distribution channels available to the firm. The obvious one here is the firm’s Web site, which is typically the first place a customer will look for the Open Source product. Many firms also enter into relationships with partners (eg: OEMs or system integrators) to achieve higher distribution for their product. Finally, firms can also opt for the direct sales route, as a supplement or alternative to partner relationships.

An Example: Typical Open Core Product

The model described above becomes valuable when you begin to connect the elements in the three columns together in the context of your firm’s business model. To illustrate, consider the case of a typical Open Core product, which is available in two flavors: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. If you were to model distribution channels for such a product, here is what it might look like:
From the above it should be clear that:

• The Community Edition is available for direct download from the firm’s Web site. It might also be available in the firm’s online shop (if present) as a free download.
• The Enterprise Edition is delivered on-premise and as a hosted offering, either directly by the firm or through partners.
• The firm also offers both commercial and free modules for the product, which are available for direct download from its Web site (free modules) and for purchase through its online shop (commercial modules). Both types of modules can also be delivered on-premise through partners or direct sales.
• Services such as consulting and technical support are available on-premise through partners and direct sales.

The above diagram represents some of the typical cases for an Open Core licensed product. For other types of business models, the diagram would change accordingly.

Base for Further Analysis

In addition to providing a birds-eye view of the current or proposed distribution strategy, this model also provides a base for further analysis. For example:

• It provides a way to identify which delivery methods and channels are most utilized, simply by looking at the number of connections, and thereby derive additional information about sales process requirements. For example:
  • Where products, modules and services can all be delivered on-premise, this imposes a requirement on sales staff to have sufficient knowledge and marketing collateral for all these offerings.
  • Where products and modules are available both for free download and purchase via the Web site, the Web site must provide corresponding information and support infrastructure (eg: payment processing, security, account management).
• It quickly identifies areas of under-utilization, which in turn represent potential opportunities for product distribution. For example, the diagram has no arrows entering or leaving the SaaS delivery method. This might be an opportunity for the firm to develop a new business model, by delivering its product as a SaaS solution for a specific market niche.

Summary

Distribution is key to getting an Open Source product into the hands of users and developers, and monetizing on top of user adoption. This model is a useful tool to add to your Open Source marketing toolkit as it provides a way to identify key distribution channels for different elements of the commercial offering, identify areas of concentration or under-utilization, and find unexploited opportunities.

It’s been quiet for a month on my Weblog due to still increasing demand for the services offered by InitMarketing. The more I am happy to be able to present some of the work we are doing for our clients.

In June, we started to work with YMC on what we labeled “marketing phase 1″. This project set out to build a completely new corporate design and identity. We re-defined the positioning and branding of YMC, re-launched their corporate website regarding visual appearance and content, created marketing collaterals and more.

About YMC

YMC is located in Switzerland. Their software is what we categorized as “Open Source Web 2.0 Content Management” and it is named Volano. Volano is based on eZ Publish and – you might have already guessed it – provides some cool Web 2.0 functionality on top of it. Volano itself is available under an Open Source license to YMC’s customers.

YMC provides support and services for Volano and currently focuses on the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). One major customer of YMC is Swiss Televsion SF where they use Volano for the website related to the daily news broadcast SF Tagesschau. A highly interesting implementation done by YMC is 029, a Web 2.0 portal where social travel booking takes place: A group of people can find the best package for joint holidays.

Corporate Design

Most of all, I am happy about the results achieved in creating a new corporate design for YMC. We started with the logo and then moved on to designing the website.

New YMC Website.

I especially do like the rings and the illustration used in the banner. The rings symbolize communities that sometimes overlap. The pieces of the rings sum up the individuals who are members of the community.

The illustration is great because it is a creative piece of art that is in sync with the banner’s claim that YMC combines spontaneity and quality in it’s Web 2.0 content management solution. Most importantly, the illustration highly differentiates YMC from other software companies, who tend to use stock photos of architectural buildings or even worse, of two business men shaking their hands.

The new corporate design also works well regarding booth designs, as this picture shows, taken at OpenExpo a few days ago:

YMC booth at OpenExpo 2008 (Credit: Andreas Heer).

The corporate design work also included the design of business cards, presentation slides, case studies, etc. and we are about to deliver the style guide to YMC.

Marketing Collaterals

We at InitMarketing assisted YMC in re-structuring and re-writing the content of www.ymc.ch to have it in sync with the more focused brand identity of YMC. We are currently in the proccess of coaching YMC when it comes to identifying and writing about thought leader topics on YMC’s corporate Weblog. Furthermore, we helped YMC in writing two case studies and delivered a case study template to them.

All this marketing work forms the basis for the public relations activities we just started for YMC.

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”.

There is no need to spend a fortune in marketing dollars to launch a new Open Source product. You can create substantial buzz with a low marketing budget to win your first customers.

The basic rules are:

1. Don’t think big, think smart: Acquire a bootsrapper’s state of mind.
2. Communicate early, communicate often: For every step of your software development and release process, think of a related small marketing initiative.

The good thing about Open Source software is that there is nothing to hide. You can inform the public and let it participate in your project from the second you had the idea of building it. The openness of the Open Source development model allows low budget micro-marketing on the internet to build an ecosystem with emerging sales leads even before the product is ready for production use.

The benefits of launching a product the Open Source Marketing way are:

• Less error-prone: Just like the OSS model allows developers to modify the software incrementally based on feedback from a growing community, so does it allow Open Source Marketing to adjust campaigns on-the-fly based on interactive communication.
• Immediate results: Instead of spending a lot of time upfront on developing an optimal marketing solution, incremental and satisficing steps allow to achieve immediate marketing results with a very basic product marketing strategy to start from.
• Risk reduction: An OSS company can gradually grow its marketing efforts from tiny initiatives focusing on a very specific and small audience to large-scale global media campaigns in parallel to a growing customer base and confidence through an adaptive marketing approach.

Here are some sample marketing actions, applicable on different stages of the product development life cycle:

1. You got an idea about a new OSS product? Why not discuss it on your blog right from the start and invite others to comment on your thoughts? Most likely, you will get some good input that will allow you to tweak your idea and save money on business consulting. Furthermore, you have planted the first seed for growing a community related to your upcoming product by attracting visionaries.
2. Get the product website ready a month or two before you make the source code available. Provide a registration form where everyone can subscribe and get notified once you publish the code. This is how you can collect leads. You can later turn the notification service into a newsletter where you inform about upcoming releases.
3. Make the source code available publicly ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet (a perfectionist’s trap), get the software out there and continue developing it in SVN. There are plenty of great developers who enjoy trying out a cool new OSS product even in pre-alpha state. Maybe one of them will become a contributor and early adopter?
4. Of course, you will keep blogging about the progress of your development and business efforts to attract new community members and to increase loyalty of those already observing or participating in what you are doing.
5. It’s time for an alpha release. Create a blog about it, with brief general information about your product, including business benefits. If applicable, include some screenshots as well. Link to the installation documentation you wrote. Nicely ask some of your peers to blog about the release and to refer to your blog entry or the product website.
6. For the beta release, it might make sense to contact a PR or marketing agency (I heard of InitMarketing providing all sorts of OSS marketing services ) who help you to create some buzz in the blogosphere. Set up an invitation-only online demo which will allow you to collect some more leads. Include a screencast on the product website that explains what your software does and what it’s good for.

Once you have reached the beta release milestone, you might want to employ a marketing expert or outsource some marketing work to an agency. After the beta release you might start to charge for support, especially installation and configuration to companies who can afford that – make sure that you still help out those with related questions on the forum for free.

Additionally some early adopters might consider using your software in production based on their good impression of the beta release and once the stable version is out. These potential customers share your vision of the product and see the same business benefits as you do. They might pay you for standby support , consulting, customizing.

Inexpensive prosumer software and social media marketing tools allow you to decide for each task of a marketing action if you want to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The same choice that OSS customers can make between investing time (install, configure, extend yourself) or money (get support and services from the OSS vendor) is true for OSS companies marketing their product.

For example, do you want to create the product screencast yourself or have a marketing agency record it? Do you want to upload it to YouTube or run your own video streaming platform? This choice allows you to keep your marketing efforts for a product launch low at the beginning and to expand your marketing budget over time as revenue grows.

It would not be too far fetched to talk about some of Microsoft’s PR talk related to Open Source as driven by a burned lands strategy in the past years.

Let’s leave the past behind. Let’s assume that Microsoft is seriously concerned about interoperability and openness. Let’s assume they are trying to understand how the Open Source business works and want to engage with Open Source companies in a friendly manner. Let’s not discuss whether Microsoft opens their APIs due to a self-decided business strategy or whether the EU made them make the decision.

Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

To understand the position Microsoft is in from a marketing communications perspective, take a look at the following analogy: Imagine a country that invaded a foreign land and actually burned the lands to defeat its inhabitants, but without military success. The invaded country was able to defend itself and won the war. Imagine business men of the aggressor country coming back one year after the war trying to establish business relationships.

As a citizen of the invaded country – would you trust those business men?

I can imagine that those Microsoft employees who by their corporate role and conviction sincerely want to establish mutually beneficial relationships with Open Source companies and communities face mistrust. They are often being accused of the “old crimes” and are being seen as the enemy.

As of today, Microsoft is in the middle of constant crisis management with Open Source. To get out of it, it seems Microsoft is rightly entering an era of diplomacy and friendly (naturally somewhat unclear) statements which are supposed to help grow trust between Microsoft and the Open Source community. This effort of small and large steps will have to balance naysayers as well as yaysayers to produce realistic results. Hence, it will be important for Microsoft to stay focused and committed.

While at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum and OSBC, one could witness Microsoft’s diplomacy at work:

• “Open Source is here to stay”, said Sam Ramji at the OSS ISV forum and Brad Smith mentioned during his keynote at OSBC: “We at Microsoft appreciate the important role that Open Source plays.”

• During his OSBC keynote, Brad Smith eloquently apologized for Bill Gates and Steve Balmer once calling Open Source communism and cancer: “Ultimately, people are not caricatures. They get up in the morning. They get smarter. The industry evolves. And you want that. You don’t want people to have to live with the caricatures and stay with those caricatures.”

Even to Microsoft, Open Source has proven to be a viable and lucrative business – why else would they partner with Open Source vendors? From there, it is just one more step for Microsoft to adopt Open Source business strategies themselves for relevant products or parts of them.

With Microsoft being a company relying on partners for 96% of its revenues, it will be highly important to drive innovation by building its partner network not only on top of commercial interests and proprietary software, but also on merit and fame for great software development achievements – a huge benefit of Open Source communities.

Microsoft needs to leave behind the scorched earth policies that clearly don’t work. Microsoft’s top executives need to re-state and re-assure that they want to live in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with Open Source. Most of all, Microsoft will have to accept that patent gimmicks won’t get them anywhere in their quest to play nicely with the Open Source community.

Otherwise, Microsoft will continue to cripple itself when it comes to additional strategic business options available with Open Source – not being able to apply OSS business strategies to some of their own products or growing cooperation with OSS vendors and projects. The intended acquisition of Yahoo! will be ill-fated without Microsoft successfully building a good relationship with the Open Source community, given that prominent community members such as PHP’s Rasmus Lerdorf are key to Yahoo!’s success.

The goal for Microsoft is to get past the point where they rely on the Open Source community giving them the benefit of the doubt and instead leverage the potentials of Open Source to Microsoft’s own advantage based on trustful relationships with the cathedrals and the bazaars.

Good ‘ol friend Zak pointed me to a major Open Source event in Romania: eLiberatica.

Intro blurb from their site:

The eLiberatica Conference brings community leaders from around the world to talk about the hottest topics in FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) movement demonstrating the advantages of adopting, using and developing Open Source and Free Software solutions.

Some of the stars will be speaking there: Rasmus Lerdorf, Monty Widenius, Brian Behlendorf, Aleksander Farstad and of course Zak himself. The sessions and workshops cover various interesting topics, they all are in English. The registration fee is quite moderate: 249 EUR and even less if you book now.

If you’re close, don’t miss it from May 18th-19th in BraÅ?ov, Romania.