Category Marketing

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.

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

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

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.

Microsoft's Open Source Dilemma and Diplomacy

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

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.

Marketing Open Source Software – Slides Online

Sandro Groganz 7 Comments

I just finished my talk at Drupalcon and put the slides online:

Thanks to everyone who attended and I very much enjoyed the discussions we had about marketing Drupal.

PS: I shamelessly forked some conceptual and visual ideas for the slides from Marty Neumeier – if you steal, steal from the best! I’ll evolve my slides over time and make them more unique once we have a corporate design for InitMarketing. The logo contest is still open.

 

Drupal Marketing Dissected

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

Let me share some of my analysis of Drupal marketing efforts while getting prepared for my talk Marketing Open Source Software at Drupalcon. Comments are highly welcome, be it to this blog entry or during my talk or any day while I am at Drupalcon.

Drupal is a great brand

The Drupal brand is highly visible: For example, a Google search for Drupal generates 19 million results. Compare this with Alfresco, generating just 1.8 million results (including the Alfresco Grill).

The Drupal brand is vivid: A big part of the Drupal brand is in the people in the community.

Drupal is a registered trademark: That allows VCs to justify a $7 million investment.

Drupal is successful

There will be a whopping 800 attendees at Drupalcon – sold out – wow! That’s double the amount of the previous conference. Nice growth rate.

200 000 registered users at drupal.org, 300 signing up each day, Drupal downloads approaching 100 000 a month, and more impressive Drupal statistics.

Comparing this with the statistics of other Open Source CMS, it clearly places Drupal in the top league.

Drupal marketing is community-driven

Drupal joined the forefront of Open Source marketing. Not only is the product Open Source, but marketing Drupal is itself being managed and performed like an Open Source project. Everyone is invited to contribute to Drupal marketing by helping craft a marketing strategy, positioning statement, marketing collaterals and all.

This leads to a load of valuable information created by enthusiastic volunteers which would typically cost tens of thousands of dollars. For example, take a look at the Drupal 6 landing page and you will be greeted by plenty of information and many videocasts.

Drupal is not the first when it comes to community-driven marketing. The Typo3 Communication Committee and its members such as the excellent Daniel Hinderink are doing a great job in volunteer-based marketing. The Plone community is also following that marketing path.

Balancing interests of Drupal stakeholders

Drupal Association and Acquia, the VC-backed startup of Drupal lead Dries Buytaert, are the backbones of Drupal’s success. Both organizations are being lead by Dries, which is good, because it ensures a balanced strategy. In Dries’ own words:

Since the health and vitality of the Drupal project at large is extremely important to us, we’ve taken great pains to make sure that I am able to continue to act for the best interests of the Drupal community at large as I have done for the past 7 years.

Drupal marketing challenges

Sounds like the sun always shines in Drupal land, but there are severe challenges ahead for the Drupal community.

Let’s look at the issues from a strategic point first:

  • Does the Drupal community want to grow? I guess so.
  • How do they want to grow? I have no clue and did not find any public information or discussion yet. Do they want to appeal more to business professionals (e.g. system integrators) now that there is a Red Hat style support subscription for Drupal within eyespot?
  • What are the means for growth? Drupal Association invests what they get from donations and sponsors. Apparently, they can raise quite some money e.g. for Drupalcon. Will they be able to raise money for marketing if necessary?

It is clear that Drupal needs to focus its marketing if they wanted to communicate to business professionals. This is presumably in the interest of Acquia. It is of course also in the interest of Drupal Association and all other members of the Drupal community, because clear messages will attract more pragmatists to Drupal’s Open Source market place – this is where the money is.

Some concrete suggestions from my perspective, which is somewhere between a visionary (I still feel young-at-heart) and pragmatist (I do have some experience):

The impression I have of Drupalcon up-to-now is: chaos.

The schedule was made available only two weeks before the event happens – much too late! A friend of mine who wants to meet with me at Drupalcon asked me a few days ago: “Sandro, I would attend only two days, which days would you recommend?” Well, I could not tell him, because there was no schedule available.

I was happy that I knew very early that my talk was accepted, but I felt uncomfortable that I did not know the exact day and time. Drupalcon is not my only concern, I have an open source marekting company to manage and some work to do myself. I rather book flights late, because some urgent work or customer meeting might require me to depart later or return earlier then planned.

Furthermore, I did not receive an email telling me that my talk was accepted. Maybe this is because the organizers told me in advance in private email. What about other speakers? Did they first hear that their talk was accepted from the various blog posts? If so, then I recommend that Drupalcon organizers don’t assume that potential speakers read their blog, because some people might simply not have the time to do so. Just send them an email and make all other necessary information available on the Drupalcon Web site.

Speaking about the Drupalcon Web site … too much information at too many places and not properly organized. The most important piece of information, the week at a glance schedule is even unavailable right now. Similar issues exist with the Drupal 6 landing page, which provides too much information and makes it hard to grasp the major benefits of Drupal 6 in ten seconds.

In fact, there is also important information missing or hard to find (at least, I did not manage to find it quickly enough). For example, how can I get an idea of the Drupal business environment, because I want to make sure that there is enough support I can get for money? There is a list of Drupal hosting companies, but that is only a fraction of all businesses. What about system integrators, media agencies, training providers, and so on?

Community-driven marketing is a mixed blessing

All of the above issues show that community-driven marketing can have its downsides. What looks like an highly dynamic community from the inside can easily look like a chaotic bunch of volunteers from the outside. To avoid this impression, Drupal marketing needs to better take care of the limited time available to professionals who “just” do business with Drupal.

This means two things:

First, at the top entry levels (e.g. Drupal 6 landing page), always provide only very necessary information. This information should help the audience to decide:

  1. This is not of interest to me
  2. I will take a look at this later
  3. I want to jump right into it

Second, don’t mix up pull information (e.g. Weblogs) with push information (e.g. speaker confirmation), make sure you adhere to best practices, so that your audience is not being confused by unexpected behavior (i.e. there is no alternative to sending out speaker confirmation emails).

Wanted: Drupal marketing lead

Please, Drupal marketing volunteers, don’t get me wrong. I think you are doing a tremendous job, I think you stand out from the crowd and do your best with fantastic results. What you do need now is a marketing strategy as the basis for consolidation and a leader in Drupal marketing who thoroughly takes care of focusing the brand.

The saying goes that a good software developer can boil down 100 lines of code to at least a third, providing the same functionality with higher performance. This is what the Drupal marketing lead is supposed to do with Drupal’s marketing collaterals: Have her boil down information to a third or fifth to make the message clearer and Drupal marketing will perform better.

The tough part for the marketing lead will be to drive consensus among the Drupal community, such as picking the best slogan from a myriad of suggestions. Unfortunately, marketing is not like software programming. The wrong slogan will not throw an error if you run it, at least not immediately. The risk is that marketing-related discussions can last forever – with let’s say 20 000 community members having 40 000 opinions – if there is no accepted authority or biased skepticism against marketing amongst community leaders.

Progress of Open Source Marketing Consultancy

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I am happy to share some exciting news with you about the Open Source marketing consultancy I currently build up:

  • I found a “f*****g awesome” (as Zak put it) company name. Thanks to Zak Greant, Lars Trieloff and Markus Nix for valuable feedback.
  • Luckily, I was able to register the related domain name.
  • European Patent and Trademark Attorney Dr. Christian Reinders helped me register the trademark.
  • Two great people will join the consultancy right from the start. They both are highly experienced when it comes to Open Source marketing and will add their specific expertise to the consultancy’s services portfolio. Their joining means that we will have offices in England and USA from day one.

The corporate Web site will go online mid February with a preliminary simple design. We will announce a logo contest at the day the Web site is up. The winner will receive an iPod touch and $50 for iTunes. Once we have a logo, the site’s design will be adjusted.

We also plan to provide a public forum where we will be happy to answer questions related to Open Source marketing.

As you might already guess: we intend to market the consultancy using the same Open Source marketing techniques which we recommend to and execute for our customers.

Emerging Sales Leads in Open Source Ecosystems

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Open Source companies benefit from continuous lead generation in an open ecosystem. They can operate with lower direct sales efforts, because prospects most likely already tried out the OSS product and contact them to agree on a deal. OSS companies can furthermore increase the number of leads with a moderate marketing budget, because their ecosystem contributes to the buzz.

oss_lead_generation

Due to their open communication environment, Open Source ecosystems provide multiple access points to the marketplace for any type of individual and organization, be it do-it-yourself developers or enterprises in search for guarantees in exchange for money.

Potential customers can download and try out the software, consult documentation for instructions, ask in forums, write about their experiences in a blog, buy a book about the software, contact support for help, sign a service level agreement, use an on-demand flavor of that software, etc.

All participants steadily increase the abundance of information in an Open Source business environment and thus make it more likely for sales leads to emerge. Abundant information ecosystems make it more likely to please and sustain curiosity of entrants to the market place. Curiosity killed the cat and fuels Open Source.

In essence, Open Source lead generation is about monetizing the chain of knowledge production related to an OSS product.

It is important for those with a commercial interest, to draw a line between paid and unpaid work which still allows both sides to benefit from each other. For example, if an Open Source vendor receives a technical question per email which they will most likely not get paid for when answering, they should nicely point the questioner to the public forum.

Free support should only be provided via forums or mailinglists. The goal is to build a public knowledge base which allows to raise the overall knowledge of the community and to allow newbies a quicker entry. This leads to professionalization of the whole business environment, more capital in the market and thus to a more profitable business for all members of the ecosystem.

Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.