Author Sandro Groganz

Blogging Turns Open Source Developers into Sales People

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

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.

Slides of LinuxTag and Webinale Presentations on Marketing Open Source Software

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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.

InitMarketing Customers: Day, Magnolia, OTRS, YMC, Zimory

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Since founding InitMarketing in February, our customer base is steadily growing. Amongst others, we help the following companies with their Open Source marketing efforts:

  • Day is a leading provider of integrated content, portal and digital asset management software.
  • Magnolia is a leading commercial open-source Enterprise Content Management System based on the Java Content Repository standard (JSR-170).
  • OTRS is a leading provider of IT service management solutions that empower companies to automate their IT and align it to the needs of the business.
  • Young Media Concepts integrates ECM, CRM and BPM into a combined powerful and easy-to-use suite named Volano, based on eZ publish Open Source CMS.
  • Zimory is the first online marketplace where anyone is able to sell and buy server capacities world-wide on the internet through a web-based interface.

The kind of work we did and do for them includes marketing strategy consulting, coaching for VC pitches, website evaluation and re-launch, writing white papers and case studies, organizing event participation, executing media campaigns and more from the broad range of Open Source marketing services that InitMarketing offers.

Thanks to all our customers for trusting in us! We know that without them, we would not exist and we are wholeheartedly committed to making them successful.

Find more information about our customers at www.initmarketing.com/customers.

Roberto Galoppini from Italy Joins InitMarketing

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

The InitMarketing team welcomes Roberto Galoppini who will join us from today. He is located in beautiful Rome, Italy and a highly valuable addition to our team.

Roberto has taken an active interest in several free/open source software organizations. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the SourceForge Marketplace and acts as the Institutional Relationship Manager for the OpenOffice.org Italian Association. Roberto is also a technical writer for IT and computer-related magazines.

Most notably, I value Roberto’s experience as an Open Source entrepreneur which aligns nicely with the pragmatic marketing approach we pursue at InitMarketing.

Roberto regularly blogs on commercial Open Source software at http://robertogaloppini.net.

I am very much looking forward to working with Roberto!

Infusing Blogging Stimulants

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

On behalf of InitMarketing, I am currently helping a customer to provide more information about their Open Source product to their community via Weblogs.

My role is that of an external coach, who reviews blog post drafts, provides concrete and strategic advice – all of which only if the bloggers ask me for my services.

Given that bloggers are their own chief editor, it is important that they control their Weblog and that they can fully commit on what they do. Dictatorship won’t get you anywhere if you want to get your employees and partners to start blogging or to blog more or to blog more regularly. Bloggers also need to understand some of the strategic marketing communications background of blogging, because that will allow them to better attract readers.

Let me share with you some answers I provided to questions which have been asked by the customer’s bloggers during the process.

Won’t information be too scattered if we don’t blog at one place but in individual blogs on different domains?

That’s a valid concern. Here’s a marketing strategy backgrounder:

On the social software level (blogs, Wiki, etc.), the credos are:

  1. Let it happen! No matter how well crafted or condensed the information provided is, any information is better than none.2) Be personal! Credit where credits are due, e.g. a blog should be personal, a Wiki should indicate contributors, etc.
  2. Be personal! Credit where credits are due, e.g. a blog should be personal, a Wiki should indicate contributors, etc.

The social media marketing approach follows very closely the Open Source development mode, just like “release early, release often” it follows the idea of “communicate early, communicate often”. There are tools which help to provide an overview of various information resources, e.g. RSS aggregators help to show all latest posts from different blogs.

On the traditional marketing communications level, content can be re-use from blogs, Wikis, etc. to publish well crafted and designed collaterals which are in line with the main marketing message(s). Such collaterals would be the corporate website, newsletters, white papers, brochures, and so on. Traditional marketing communications is more centralized in that it is the sole responsibility of the marketing team.

How should a blog author react on a comment: By replying in a comment or by adding a new post answering the comment?

First: The fact that there are comments is great and indicates that your post is of high value.

Concerning the question:

It’s hard to say where to draw a line between a comment and a new blog post. I’d say it’s worth a new blog post

  1. if you feel like you want to write one (in the end, you are the chief editor of your blog)
  2. if the new blog post is actually about a new topic and does not merely address the topic of the comment from another perspective
  3. if you do have the time to write a new blog post

Should you write a new blog post, make sure you link to the comment. Additionally, you can reply to the comment of the other blog post and there point to the new blog post, so that it becomes clear that you answered the comment in a new blog post.

How often should we blog?

There should be at least one post per week each by two persons in your team to keep and grow readership. There will be days where it will be hard to meet that requirement. Hence, if you have an idea for a new blog post, make sure you leave some time in between posts. You could already write that post (because the ideas are already spinning in your head) but not publish it yet, instead keep it as a draft. Then publish the new blog post some days later.

Defining the Target Audience of an Open Source Software Company

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Without understanding the target audience, Open Source businesses will not be able to effectively communicate with those who are supposed to buy their products, support, services and contribute to software development.

Ideally, the target audience has been defined in the corporate marketing strategy. Although this might seem obvious, most of the Open Source companies we work with at InitMarketing have a rather vague idea about whom they want to talk and sell to. The following reasons are typical:

  • Open Source start ups have usually only broadly defined a go-to-market strategy and target audience in their business plan, which is good enough for their VCs who are rather interested in the grand picture which allows them to assess the business potential.
  • Those Open Source companies who have in the past years organically grown their business from a one or two man show of developers to 10-30 staff members have always somehow made money with their product. They intuitively understand their target audience, but never reflected upon it to expand their business more quickly with a focused marketing strategy.
  • Even large to super-large corporations who are in the Open Source business much too often lack a good understanding of their target audience. The reason being that business decisions of top management (such as “let’s start to port our software to Linux”) are being executed with poor strategic guidelines.

The Branding and Positioning page in my Wiki provides some ideas how to address the needs of your target audience – but how to understand them? Will you have to pay expensive market analysis programs? No, you don’t, because informed intuition comes to the rescue plus the fact that Open Source allows for incremental marketing.

Geoffrey A. Moore defines informed intuition in his classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm:

The key is to understand how intuition – specifically, informed intuition – actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images – really, data fragments – that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. […] so in marketing can whole target-customer populations become imagined as teenyboppers, yuppies, pickups and gun racks. These are all just images – stand-ins for a greater reality – picked out from a much larger set of candidate images on the grounds that they really “click” with the sum total of an informed person’s experience.

In his book, Moore further describes how to define sample scenarios that allow to understand the user, technical buyer and economic buyer. In essence, the definition of a target audience should be able to answer this little question: Why does your product matter?

Given that many of today’s successful Open Source businesses are alternatives to closed source competitors (e.g. Linux vs. Microsoft, MySQL vs. Oracle), it is quite easy for them to imagine their target audience. Such Open Source products are being used by developers, hence it is mostly developers developing for developers. To define a target audience, such companies basically just need to look at themselves.

The higher Open Source moves up the stack, the more important it becomes for Open Source software vendors and their partner companies to focus on end user needs, a target audience very different from how software programmers think. One example would be SugarCRM who successfully communicate to sales and marketing personnel across various industries.

Due to the Open Source development mantra release early, release often, companies can adjust their understanding of the target audience gradually at minimum risk, but only if they also follow the mantra of incremental marketing: communicate often, communicate early. They will automagically learn to understand their target audience as long as they make sure that they allow for interactive external communication for example through an online forum on their website and establish good internal communication within their organization between the development, marketing and sales teams.

The combination of informed intuition and incremental marketing forms a general business advantage for Open Source companies, because it allows them to minimize the risk of being guided by prejudices when it comes to understanding the target audience.

Incrementally Marketing an Open Source Product Launch to Win Your First Customers

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

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.

Andreas Heer from Switzerland Joins InitMarketing

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Andreas Heer joins InitMarketingThe InitMarketing team keeps growing. This time Andreas Heer from Switzerland joins us.

He is a great addition due to his strong background as a journalist of German-speaking newspapers and magazines in Switzerland. Andi is a board member of /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group. With Andi’s expertise, our Open Source marketing services can only become better.

Andi, great to have you on our team!