Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to OpenACS Marketing & Promotion Project

In my experience, "word of mouth is the best advertising".

Apache, Slashdot, PHPNuke, <insert your favorite phenomenon on the Web here> probably didn't have that much marketing collateral when it was in the same stage of development that OpenACS is now. Rather than reading about them, you can install them with little effort and start using them or demo them to a client.

If you're value proposition is that once you climb the TCL/AolServer/Postgres learning curve with this wonderful community toolbox you'll be ready to create great websites then all the marketing collateral in the world isn't going to be nearly as effective as creating a great out-of-the-box experience. On the other hand, if you can install OpenACS and within minutes be adding content to a Slashdot-like bulletin board, have a cool homepage that lists all the wonderful features that are available, and be able to administrate the whole thing with an easy-to-use interface, I guarantee that OpenACS usage would explode to the point that you'll probably be looking for a new set of servers to house the project on.

If you want to see an example of this in action take a look at PHPNuke and its community. Within minutes I can have Apache, PHP4, MySQL and PHPNuke installed on my Linux box and I'm posting news for others to comment on, adding polls, etc. It has a nice default look and feel. I can show my buddies in a very short amount of time how cool this thing is. I dont want to spend allot of time looking for marketing collateral to tell them how cool it is, all I want to do is show them. In turn, some of my buddies will download the software and create someting cool. The word of mouth advertising cycle repeats. There's allot of addons being created and posted on phpnuke.org for this simple reason.

If you're a consulting firm, replace the word "buddies" with "clients" in the preceeding paragraph.

Is PHPNuke as fully featured as OpenACS? No way. Can a pretty face be slapped on OpenACS with relatively little effort. Probably. Like all projects its a matter of priorities. If you're looking to mazimize your effort in promoting OpenACS, creating a great out-of-the-box experience will go allot farther than creating marketing collateral. Me, I'm still climbing the TCL/AolServer/Postgres learning curve trying to get my first OpenACS site looking the way I want it. I sure wish I had a cool example site that came with the installation that I could start tweaking.

If an ever larger number of people are downloading and using OpenACS you wont have to contact the press. The press will be contacting you.

By the way, would someone with administrative authority on openacs.org care to set up an opinion poll on the home page to cover issues like these? Something like:

What would best promote OpenACS to the public?

- More and better marketing collateral

- A better out-of-the-box experience

- Integrate AolServer/OpenACS with Apache

- Advertise on playboy.com

- ....


The current issue aside, I'd like to see more options to share my opinion on openacs.org than just the bboards. Maybe this is more feedback for Talli and the site redesign?