CMSWire asked me to be the first they interview for their brand new column Flash Quiz. If you ever wondered how much I sleep and whether I like fancy cars, check out Flash Quiz: Sandro Groganz Speaks.
Category Marketing
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.
Marketing for Idiots
I don’t like marketing phrases trying to pull my leg even before I know what the offer is about. Recently, I received an email from my German mobile phone provider, it starts (translated from German):
You have to grab this chance!
… and I stopped reading and immediately deleted the email. Do they think they can talk me into a buying decision with an initial aggressive sentence?
I get the same feeling of being treated like an idiot after reading lots of information hardly finding the price of the offer, nor being able to make a choice. Try out Microsoft SharePoint Web site – how long will it take you to find a price tag? How much longer will it take until you got an idea which of the SharePoint product variants might be the right one for you?
Some products might need more explanation than others, but in the end, all a customer wants to know is: What do I get for which price?
Assuming that higher intelligence leads to higher income/revenue, why are those with a good spending power much too often being treated like idiots by marketing? Customers mature just like markets mature, urging marketing to catch up, make potential customers feel intelligent and acknowledge that they can decide for themselves.
Marketing 2.0 and its Resemblance to Open Source
There is this fantastic working paper over at Harvard Business School that sums it all up so well what has been labeled Social Marketing or Marketing 2.0: Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers.
The authors hit the nail, positioning marketing in a constructivist manner by referring to Web 2.0 phenomena they describe as “consumer collaboration”, “digitally enhanced communication among consumers”, “peer-to-peer interactivity”.
[…] marketing is a cultural producer. Just as an author puts into circulation words that do not become ideas except in the minds and hands of readers who make them over for individual or social purposes, so marketing in this paradigm aspires to be an author in the culture of its customers. For marketing to play this role it needs to be welcomed, not resisted.
I can’t get that idea out of my head that Marketing 2.0 was actually invented years ago by Open Source developers. Their style of communication has lead to transparent and honest information about their products, something that customers of Open Source software highly appreciate.
Additionally, no Open Source company can afford a marketing guy who has no or only little clue of software technologies, because especially when it comes to community relations (which I regard as part of Open Source marketing) one can only convince by expertise.
Hence, I believe that the Open Source style of marketing aka evangelism aka community relations has very much formed the basis of Marketing 2.0 and contributed to the understanding that marketing needs to act more like an ally of customers rather than an intruder (e.g. by aggressive mass advertising).
This makes me hope that with Marketing 2.0, things will become more realistic in all kinds of businesses. Marketing staff will loose their nimbus of spin doctors, magical seducers and manipulators. Instead, marketing will be much more about forming trustworthy relationships based on human interaction between a company and its customers.
Marketing 2.0 also requires marketing persons as well as management and staff in general to develop their own voice, because only authentic communication e.g. via blogs can leverage “the power to mobilize identity” (as the working paper states) within and between customers and company.
Something I miss in the HBS working paper is a discussion of Long Tail effects on marketing. For example, whether and how social marketing needs to be different in the head and the tail?
Open Source PR Agency in USA: Terpin Communications
4 months ago, Mindquarry was searching for a PR agency in the USA and today we can already look back at a highly successful public relations campaign, performed by Terpin Communications.
I am extremely happy with the results achieved by Terpin. They helped build up a growing momentum in the blogsphere which just now starts to spill over to traditional media.
Terpin exceeded our expectations when it comes to number of Mindquarry downloads, unique visitors at www.mindquarry.com and Google hits for “mindquarry” as well as the ranking of our Web site for certain keyword searches. Due to increased public visibility, we got contacted by new customers, potential partner companies and investors.
Our points of contact at Terpin are very attentive and highly responsive to all our requests. I appreciate their strategic expertise in software marketing and especially in PR for Open Source product vendors. Terpin is a reliable, goal-oriented and well connected PR agency.
Credit where credits are due. Thanks Terpin!
Ice Cream and the Interaction of Sales and Marketing
A few weeks ago I spent a fantastic weekend in lovely Regensburg with my wife. It was sunny and hot weather, so we decided to buy ice cream from one of the street vendors.
There was a queue of five people and while waiting at the end of the line, we were not able to see all the flavors they offer. When it was our turn, the iceman pressured us with a nervous tone in his voice to choose quickly (there were 3 others in the line behind us). After the purchase was done, my wife told me that she only bought one scoop of ice cream, although she intended to buy two, because she felt overstrained.
This story tells us the basics of sales and marketing: Marketing should provide the necessary information about all available options to customers, while sales supports them in their buying decision.
Some tips for ice cream street vendors:
- Place a poster with color photos and names of all available ice flavors highly visible to those waiting in the queue.
- Make sure your sales personal provides enough time to customers to make a decision – sales will increase. You won’t lose those waiting at the very end of the queue, because they are already crazy for your ice cream after studying the poster with flavor options.
Someone wants to start a cool ice cream business with me?
The same two tips also apply to the software business, especially because costs are much higher compared to end-user ice cream purchases. The financial risk of making a wrong decision is higher for customers when buying software and related services.
Hence, provide enough information and don’t rush potential customers – otherwise they might only buy one scoop instead of two, or nothing at all.
Sandro Groganz 