It’s been very quiet on my blog for a long time. The reason being that I’ve been tinkering with and then building a software product for the past 9 months.

As a marketing consultant for open-source vendors, I’ve been closely following trends in digital marketing and used various tools to get my job done:

• Basecamp and then JIRA for agile marketing management
• Hootsuite for social media publishing
• Google Docs for strategy development and copy writing
• Google Analytics for website traffic
• Google Spreadsheets to collect statistical data for monitoring
• HubSpot for marketing automation
• Google Adwords for online advertisement
• and more

There’s an amazing amount of manual work involved in digital marketing and as I found out through my consulting business, even at very large corporations.

Last year, I was searching for software that covered planning, execution and monitoring of digital marketing campaigns. There are proprietary products that come close, but they are

• off-the-shelf offerings that are hard to integrate with third-party online channels,
• or in the cloud and thus a walled garden.

Let alone open-source solutions for digital marketing: There was nothing out there. Search for “open source campaign management” on Google and you mostly get newsletter tools.

Yet, I was looking for software that would have allowed me to plan and schedule newsletters along with posting messages on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus that point to a landing page connected with that software, make a video public on YouTube and then monitor it all through Google Analytics and automatically capture the number of people who visited the landing page and watched the video two weeks after the campaign launched.

Scratching my own itch, I decided to build it on my own. Not having programmed for 10 years, it was a great experience to be hacking again. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. Today I launched the website and published a first alpha release along with comprehensive documentation.

Hop over to www.campaignchain.com and give it a try. Of course, I’d be happy to walk you through a live demo if you don’t want to mess with installing it on your own.