I am particularly proud to welcome Alexander Kempkens on board of the Initmarketing team. Starting in 2004 as a developer for the Mambo project he co-founded the Joomla CMS in 2005. Ever since he is working for the Joomla project as community manager and was the responsible of marketing/communications and events coordinator. In addition to that, Alex has recently finished his studies in International Management. Hence, he is one of the very rare people who have combined expertise in marketing, community development, software programming and business management with experience in the Open Source domain.

Matt Asay urges Open Source software vendors to rethink their marketing stance:

Open-source advocates for years have waved the banners of “freedom” and “no vendor lock-in” to sell the value of open source. It hasn’t worked. Chief information officers don’t buy vague concepts. They buy high-quality software at a compelling price. To better market open-source software to the world, open-source advocates need to match their message to what CIOs actually want to buy.

He furthermore argues that customers don’t care about “no lock-in” as a key reason to buy Open Source and states:

The reality is that open-source vendors should be pitching real value to real customers.

The question of what is reality and what is real is of course a philosophic one. In marketing, we need to be very pragmatic because it is all about the customer and the money, right? Matt’s blog posts sound pragmatic, nevertheless they are too narrow for my taste – perhaps due to his (welcome) intention to get the discussion going. Let my try to offer a broader perspective:

Real freedom

In general, I do agree with Matt that “freedom” might not be the most important Unique Buying Proposition (UBP) to first-time commercial users, but this is not where your marketing should stop. In fact, it seems that the longer someone uses FOSS, the more important the “freedom” aspects become — namely open standards, vendor independence (aka no lock-in), and the free and open source software philosophy.

This means that when pitching an Open Source product or solution, be it by the vendor or partners, “freedom” is nothing you should highlight directly. Instead, mention tangible business benefits such as saving licensing costs, greater flexibility and ability to integrate with third-party software, etc. Free Software advocates might argue that such business benefits simply translate the freedom aspect for CIOs – which makes a lot of sense to me.

Looking at the complete business ecosystem of an Open Source vendor (and not just the sales relationships), tells you that freedom is important for success. For example, every OSS vendor loves to argue that their software is so much more stable than proprietary software due to a large community using and testing it. Freedom is essentially also behind Marten Mickos’ main argument to the EU commission to approve the Oracel/Sun deal:

[...] the vast and free installed base of MySQL is using it of their own free choice, unencumbered by the vendor and under no obligation or restraint.

What this tells an Open Source advocate or sales person is that the CIO-centric business benefits on your product brochure are just as important as good technical documentation for developers that allows to grow a community.

Real regions

The type of engagement varies depending on the region you plan to market and sell to. For example, Open source adoption seems to be driven by commercial engagements in Northern Europe, while Southern and Eastern Europe is characterized by community-driven engagements. In Spain and Italy, users expect free software to be available for free. Clearly, this does not mean that freedom is the main UBP in Spain and Italy, as long as you don’t look at it from the cost perspective. What it actually means is that the partner sales channel is of strategic importance to Open Source vendors in these regions. Partners in Spain and Italy might not mention freedom directly to their potential customers, but they will strongly insist on it when the vendor wants them to sign a costly partner agreement.

What this tells an Open Source advocate or sales person is that different regions require different go-to-market strategies. The cost argument is not always the same one for every region and the freedom argument might just be waiting around the corner, especially when it comes to growing a partner network.

Real propositions

There is not the one and only real UBP. There are several. Each of them have different importance in different regions, let alone the fact that small businesses have different expectations than large corporations.

Most important to Open Source advocates it that there are communication and sales processes in Open Source Marketing that one should take care of. Open Source lead generation begins very early (Twitter, Weblog, etc.) and does not end once you closed a deal. It’s a continuous process. When a customer bought your cost argument, you’d better make sure that this customer can also experience the freedom of using your product. Open up endless opportunities through third-party extensions, technical tutorials and so on. This is how you retain customers in Open Source. It only works if you have built-in freedom into your business ecosystem.

Our second daughter Emilia Teresa Groganz was born Friday, September 11th.

After she kept us in suspense for 10 days, we are so happy that she is finally with us.

@Emilia: We love you, you enrich our family! We can’t wait to see you walk, talk and make a lot of crazy things . We are thankful for you!

Wazi just published an article I wrote, comparing Europe and the US, which hopefully allows Open Source vendors based in the US to better understand the European market.

The article is based on the research I did for the talk I presented at this year’s OSBC. The part I personally find most interesting is:

It’s worth noting here the German study revealed that saving on licensing costs is more important to those adopting open source software for the first time. The longer someone uses FOSS, the more important the “freedom” aspects become — namely open standards, vendor independence, and the free and open source software philosophy. Hence, open source vendors need to approach potential customers in Europe differently depending on how open source savvy these potentials are.

That same study actually revealed a high level of satisfaction of users of Free and Open Source Software.

I’d like to thank the InitMarketing team for their valuable input while researching the topic and writing the article!

Now, enjoy reading my article over at Wazi: A Primer on Europe for US-Based Open Source Communities and Vendors

Open Source companies have various internet-based channels at hand to reach their community and prospective customers. The following approach has proven to be effective in reaching the various target audiences within and outside of an Open Source ecosystem.

The basic idea is to let information flow freely inside and across various communication channels so that information pieces can “bubble up” and be compiled into more comprehensive and valuable sources of information that serve a business purpose.

For example, a forum discussion could form the basis for a technical article that is supposed to be published by a magazine with the goal to attract new software developers to the community. In this case, the outlined information value chain serves the purpose of community development. The nice thing about it is, that the article author will save time when writing the tutorial, because the discussion that happened in the forum already allows him to understand all relevant aspects of the topic and might also provide useful information, links to other resources, etc.

To achieve far reaching and successful marcom, Open Source companies should set up or become active on all relevant channels.

It is first of all important that communication actually happens and of less importance that it happens in the right channels. For example, if Open Source vendors think of providing a public Wiki to the community, quickly fears of a chaotic information overload come up. In fact, I have never seen hoards of community members occupy a very young Wiki. The truth is that you will have enough time to restructure content as you see fit.

Of course, you should make sure that the Wiki has a basic structure right from the start so that it becomes clear what kind of information it will provide. Additionally, it should already be populated with important content such as information where to find mailing lists, forums, Weblogs, etc. Especially when it comes to discussion channels such as mailing lists and forums, they should only be established if you are sure that they will be used actively. Otherwise, your community will appear as if it were inactive, which again alienates new potential community members.

To avoid dead communication channels, I recommend to deliberately leave pain points for a growing community. For example, don’t set up a forum in a non-English language unless there are community members who ask for it. If you then set up a dedicated forum for them, they will appreciate that you listen to your community.

Above diagram gives a good idea of the most important communication channels that all make up for the best media mix to enhance the visiblity of your Open Source offerings.

• Twitter is today’s premier channel for teaser-style communication that creates incentives for the readership to learn more about you.
• Forums and/or mailing lists are a must-have from a community building and customer relations perspective.
• Weblogs are a perfect mean to achieve technical and business-oriented thought leadership.
• A Wiki is a great tool for collecting all relevant information at one place with full flexibility of gradually modifying and extending the information base. A Wiki is somewhere in between the ad hoc style of conversation through Twitter, forums, mailinglists and a rather editorial process that a newsletter or book requires.
• Newsletters seem outfashioned in today’s world of social media marketing, where it’s more about pull information (RSS) vs. push information (newsletter subscription). The great thing about newsletters is, that they require someone sits down and collects all information important to your developer or business community of let’s say the past 4 weeks. A newsletter makes sure that everyone within your company and community has the same basic knowledge of what’s going on.
• Presentations of technical or business talks also collect various information pieces and present them to a live audience at events.
• Articles, Screencasts, and marketing collateral can be produced much more easily if there is already a multitude of existing information, e.g. in a newsletter, Wiki, Weblog, etc. A newsletter for example might even trigger the idea to write a case study about a new customer reference that has been mentioned in the newsletter or to create a screencast about a nifty new feature that was mentioned there.
• Public and Analyst Relations are much more effective if you have further information that you can provide to journalists and analysts. It also makes it easier for your PR/AR agency to write press releases if they have something they can research. It’s also very handy to be able to harvest and reference related resources such as Weblog entries, Screencasts, and more when building landing pages for a campaign.
• Books and documentation are hard to write, because they require a lot of effort. Again, they become much easier to create once there is already valuable information, such as various articles that have previously been written for magazines and can now be reused and modify for e.g. a technical book. Books and technical manuals represent the most comprehensive type of information to offer for example to those who intend to thoroughly learn about developing with an Open Source software.

An Open Source organization’s marketing and communications very much benefits from uncontroled conversations happening within the related Open Source community. If a vendor tried to manipulate communications within “his” community, he would suffer from higher marketing costs, because the free flow of information that comes at no cost will dry up.

In a nutshell, Open Source communications should take care of the following points:

1. Make and let communication happen.
2. Avoid dead communication channels.
3. Don’t control, don’t manipulate.
4. Harvest and refine information pieces.
5. Deliberately leave pain points for the community to remedy.

For the launch of Jahia United Content Bus, InitMarketing has created a video explaining the concept. Hope you like it as much as I do.

It’s been very quiet on my blog lately due to the fact that I was very busy with working for InitMarketing customers and in parallel brought InitMarketing to the next level.

InitMarketing is now 15 months old and keeps growing at a steady pace, not too fast and not too slow. I have recently added four more customer references to our Web site: IKS Project, OXID eSales, Jahia, todoyu.

My workload grew up to a point where I realized that I should do my first hire. Effective May 1st, a person in the U.S. started to work full time for InitMarketing. He is currently in probation and things look good. It’s a great relief for me to be able to transfer undone tasks at the end of my work day to the U.S. and receive finished deliverables when I start again my next work day. Of course, he’ll gradually start to manage customer projects himself and will also do sales to expand our customer base in the USA.

Ultimately, I can spend more time with my family now, especially with my little daughter. As much as I enjoy working for my customers and building InitMarketing, I don’t want to miss out on actively experiencing my daughter’s childhood.

Right from the start, I had a very good feeling concerning InitMarketing. I quickly realized from the feedback I got that I focused on the right niche at the right time. Today, things go together well once more. There are two people wthin InitMarketing who are interested in a partnership. We are currently investigating in setting up either a company with limited liability (GmbH) or a private stock company (AG) in Germany. The latter would better fit with the Open Source spirit of InitMarketing, where “credit where credits are due” would translate into “allot shares where shares are due”.

We’ll have our second child around August/September, hence I am happy to see today that InitMarketing is doing well; that others are happy to take responsibility and build the business together with me; that people are proud to work full time for InitMarketing; that the team of freelancers within InitMarketing is highly professional and knowledgeable. This all gives me the ability to support my family in a few months without sacrificing the quality of marketing services that InitMarketing customers expect.

Work-life balance at its best – but you’ll have to work hard to achieve it

I am very happy to welcome two great additions to the InitMarketing team:

Zak Greant is a good friend of mine, hence I am particularly happy to have him on board. Zak has solid experience building and managing online communities, developing electronic frontier business strategies and working with Free Software and Open Source licenses. For example, he had worked as MySQL’s community advocate and for the Mozilla Foundation.

I only recently met Dave Neary at OSBC and was deeply impressed by his understanding of the dynamics of consensus-based communities, and intimate knowledge of the concerns of businesses engaging with free software projects. Dave has served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation (2005 – 07) and was a developer and release manager of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) from 1999 until 2006.

I interviewed Jeff Whatcott about marketing Drupal and Acquia at Gilbane Boston conference. He was then VP Marketing, Acquia and recently moved to work in the same role at Brightcove.

Jeff is probably one of the brightest software marketing experts out there and in this interview, he shares some valuable insights. Most notably, he explains how Acquia offers extended functionality in the cloud for Drupal and builds a business around this combination of Open Source and SaaS that also leverages network effects. In a way, this could make Acquia the Google of the Drupal community.

As with all InitMarketing.tv videos, you can

• download, embed, rate, comment, etc. the highlights
• watch/read the full video interview

Stefan Probst just recently joined the InitMarketing team. He formerly directed SUSE R&D efforts at Novell and thus has intimate knowledge about Open Source development processes. With this expertise, Stefan is able to support our customers in setting up or optimizing development methods that are in sync with community building efforts.