Drop me a line should you also be at OSMB congress in Nuremberg, Germany. I’ll be there at January 22nd only. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Category Open Source
Free/Libre Open Source Software
Winning Pragmatists with Open Source Products
The meritocratic style of Open Source communities can irritate those who simply want to make a deal to raise their own productivity (so-called pragmatists). Highly community-driven projects without at least one strong corporate leader provide too many options frustrating especially those pragmatic buyers who are willing to spend good money for the best services.
A community without one ore more strong companies is in danger to alienate pragmatists who don’t want to invest time to become part of that community to later trade merit, but instead want to invest money to benefit immediately from the expertise hidden inside the community. For highly community-driven projects, crossing the chasm also means trading merit for money and building at least one strong corporation to provide the buying experience pragmatists expect (i.e. the whole product).
For example, Drupal is still a largely community-driven Open Source CMS project without a strong company taking the place of the cathedral in the bazaar. Where could a potential pragmatic customer turn to if in search for the one and only Drupal service provider with the best expertise, longest and most successful in-market track record and offices around the globe?
In fact, things are changing when it comes to Drupal: Acquia sets out to become for Drupal what MySQL is for MySQL. Chances are good they will succeed, given their team and $7 Million VC financing. This means that Drupal can finally line up with those Open Source competitors who are Open Source CMS vendors providing enterprise-grade services, such as Magnolia, Alfresco, eZ Systems.
Interestingly, Joomla! (formerly known as the CMS called Mambo) has gone the opposite way by cutting off the one malicious corporate head and letting a thousand small heads grow. It remains to be seen if this puts Joomla! into a good position given the long march towards consolidation in the CMS market. Same goes for Plone, now a true democratic community.
Pragmatic customers want to buy the best from the best. They appreciate simple choices and distinct correlations between a product and a company – even if they just want to turn towards that company to check out which other companies provide similar services (e.g. partner companies).
In other words: Pragmatists don’t want to search whom they need to talk to. They need a point of reference, even if it is just for comparison sake. Allow me a pointed remark: A “secret society” of community members or a multitude of small companies scares pragmatists away if that’s the only way how they can get an Open Source product up and running.
Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.
Starting Open Source Marketing Consultancy
Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.
The mission is to help companies and organizations behind Open Source projects become more visible and profitable, hence to boost adoption of Open Source. The only criteria is that a client contributes to Open Source software development, which makes up for the following types of potential customers:
- Creators: Vendors of Open Source products
- Contributors: Companies offering proprietary software including Open Source components they contribute to
- Investors: VCs financing an Open Source venture
The consultancy will be able to help with:
- Defining an Open Source marketing strategy
- Open Source communications coaching of management
- Branding and positioning
- Community building/maintenance
- Building/maintaining a partner network crediting Open Source contributions
- Public relations (printed magazines, blogosphere, …)
- Collaterals (brochures, business cards, …)
- Events (e.g. (un-)conferences, partner meetings, …)
- Investor pitches
- Managing the contents of a client’s Web site
- Social media: creating product Screencasts, coaching bloggers, …
- …
One could completely outsource all marketing activities to the consultancy or take it in for specific projects or campaigns only.
I’ll be happy to share my experiences in this Weblog with you along the way and I will continue to provide general Open Source marketing know-how distilled from client projects to the public.
I’d also be happy to hear your advice.
Quantums of Open Source Communities
I have a deep fascination for quantum physics ever after reading Heisenberg‘s book Physics and Beyond (“Der Teil und das Ganze” in German) while graduating at high school.
For example, the concept of wave-particle dualism states that all matter exhibits both wave- and particle-like properties. Just imagine the next person you are talking to suddenly transforming into innumerable numbers of waves going right through you (The Matrix contains a similar scene).
Wave-particle dualism seems like a nice analogy to describe the core elements of Open Source communities. For example, interaction between OSS community members exhibits both monetary as well as reputational properties. Money is the particle of OSS communities, while reputation is the wave.
Money and reputation can be regarded as the same “thing” which appears to us in two different properties. Both are a mean to value a person’s expertise. You get what you’re worth, either in terms of money (i.e. getting paid for your work), or in terms of reputation (i.e. being acknowledged as a valuable community member).
The dividing line between money and reputation is blurry, because money is another way of valuing reputation and building a reputation can seamlessly lead to making money.
The money-reputation-“thing” is a quantum, an indivisible entity of Open Source communities, a matter of economic and personal exchange forming the basis for The Wealth of Networks.
Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.
Corporate Identity in Open Source Markets
The potential for successfully building or extending a corporate identity based on Open Source depends on a company’s relationship towards an Open Source product. The graph below relates the extend of product ownership to the level of awareness potentially available for marketing:
Basically, the more you own the product, i.e. the more it is directly correlated to your company, the more you can make out of it.
If you’re the creator of the product (e.g. MySQL, the company, is the creator of MySQL, the database), you can utilize maximum awareness in your market. Your whole ecosystem will support your marketing efforts. For example, those providing extensions to your product, will automatically market your product while promoting their extension.
If you’re an external contributor to a product (e.g. providing patches with bug fixes), you might only be known amongst the developers community and your company will have a hard time transforming your contributions into business value via marketing. Nevertheless, being a contributor is not worthless. It allows you to build tight relationships within an OSS community, helping you to spot early trends and to mobilize visionaries and early adopters for whatever your offerings are.
System integrators market their specific expertise and experience, their goal is to build up a good reputation amongst customers. Of course, large system integrators (such as IBM) can leverage quite some awareness with all sorts of marketing tools, while small to medium ones typically try to score with their expertise (see for example Optaros White Papers).
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) typically market to a certain industry. For example, they provide extensions or add-ons for an OSS product connecting to proprietary CRM systems (e.g. SAP connectors).
Distributors, such as the major Linux distributors, can utilize a similar level of awareness like large system integrators do – of course, depending on the fact whether their offerings are industry-specific or of general nature. Product ownership of distributors is two-fold: They don’t really own the OSS products they assemble, but they do provide tools which they own (e.g. installers, updaters, etc.) and which are crucial for a distribution’s business relevance.
Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.
Open Source Marketing Checklist
Still, many Open Source projects think they will rule the world without marketing, simply because their software is hyper-fantastic-mega-great. In the early days of Open Source, that might have worked out, at least within the growing group of aficionados.
Today, there is a growing amount of often competing Open Source products and most importantly, the companies or organizations behind the software want to sell to end users who are sometimes not geeks (to say the least).
Hence, it is time to spread the word about your great Open Source product in a way that your focus group(s) understand(s) – and that’s what marketing is about. Some people call it “evangelism”, because the term “marketing” seems to have a bitter taste in the Open Source domain.
Nevertheless, in the end, what you will do, is marketing, and most likely, you will use traditional as well as new fancy means to gain visibility. So, let’s call it what it is.
The main reason why I avoid the term “evangelism” is that Open Source companies are usually technology-driven because they have been founded by software developers. The key for success lies in becoming market-driven and there’s nothing holy about it, it’s rather down-to-earth customer-oriented work.
There is indeed something special about Open Source marketing and that’s the aspect of community relations. It’s got a lot to do with social media marketing and building personal networks, in essence an ecosystem of mutual coaching and support.
I started to compile an Open Source Marketing Checklist in my Wiki and will keep extending it over time. This checklist is supposed to help Open Source companies and organizations to start or sanity-check their marketing. All hints come without any warranty, of course, but they always worked for me.
Open Sourcing Your Life
I often skip Dave Pollard’s blog entries, because they are rather long pieces of text. Yet, Dave’s latest posting struck me:
Our traditional education system teaches learned helplessness, and does not teach us how to make a living for ourselves. It perfectly feeds the industrial business-political-economic system, which wants an excess of cheap, frightened, obedient, dependent labour.
That’s basically how I felt at school and (a bit less though) at university. I dropped out of university, because at that point I had learned what I wanted to learn and it did not make any sense to me to invest two more years just to hold a piece of paper in my hands.
In the same blog entry, Dave writes:
Get a bunch of us together, bunches of bunches of us together, to start imagining how this virtuous cycle could work, perhaps using Open Source, telling stories of this Natural Economy as if it already existed.
Right, Open Source is also a way of living, a way of supporting what Dave calls “Natural Economy”. That’s why I only work for Open Source companies. I would die like a flower not getting enough sun and water in a proprietary company – which reminds me of IBM Distinguished Engineer Gunter Dueck, who believes that human beings should be treated like flowers with some of us loving the sunny deserts with little rain and others enjoying the shadows of a rain forest.
Claros, the Open Source GMail – and Even Nicer
It’s about time that I introduce you to Claros, a Web-based email client, including contact management, instant messaging for Google Talk/Jabber, digital Post-it-style notes – plus: it’s Open Source!
My good friend Görkem told me about it in March, when it was not public yet. Ever since, I kept an eye on Claros and saw a great product evolve.
Seems like it’s ready for prime time: Turkey’s biggest ASP/ISP has chosen Claros as their communication infrastructure offered to over 500,000 users.
I especially like the slick and easy to understand user interface – well done folks!
Try out the Claros online demo, screenshots, screencasts, etc.
Open Source and SaaS – Business in the Fast Lane
It’s been an exciting two weeks with all the preparations for the Mindquarry GO launch and respective public relations.
I can now clearly sense how the combination of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) dramatically accelerates our business.
We already get plenty of feedback from users who download our software and install it on their own – that’s the Open Source engine that keeps us optimizing our product. SaaS is the other turbo engine: registrations for free Mindquarry GO beta accounts are adding up and the first beta users will go live Monday. Once we have all 333 users online by September 9th, they will provide even more feedback and help us to rapidly improve our software.
As we try to consequently apply the mantra “release early, release often” to both our Open Source and SaaS offer, we multiply the effect of early user feedback leading towards a constantly enhanced product and hosted service.
The Day Your Community Comes to Life
A few days ago, it happened for the first time that someone outside of the Mindquarry team answered a question in the Mindquarry forum – that’s when a community starts to blossom.
Especially for an Open Source project, this is a magic moment, because community building is so crucial to its success.
Even though I have seen it before in other projects and companies, I am always astonished when I read in a forum about developers who give a new product a try with a lot of engagement and patience. It’s so great to have virtual strangers all around the globe seriously checking out and working with our product.
Thanks to all our forum participants, we deeply appreciate all your feedback!
PS: The best tool to start a community is still a forum or mailinglist.
Sandro Groganz 