Malte,
Agree with those points, obviously and will begin on some of them.
I think however we have a few more fundemental items to address before plunging into marketing activities.
Principally I'm thinking of:
a) Who are our targets/market? How do we profile potential users/clients. Is there indeed a profile and if not do we need to decide on one. I don't think its wise to pursue the 'its everyhting to everyone' approach.
b) Identify *exactly* the OpenACS is. To be blunt an 'open source toolkit for developing collaborative systems' is about as airy and unquantifiable as you can get. Effective marketing comes from an easily communicable, simple product description. I've had direct experience of this whereby customers can't get a 'handle' on exactly what OpenACS is or isn't.
c) Open Source. Ok, this is going to be contentious, but... we have to think very carefully about how open source is presented from a marketing perspective. Unfortunately I beleive AD made a mistake in that it got a little ' evangelical' about open source. If you push it too much then the customers can't see past it. We need to think about what in open source, the customer is realy interested in. I' aware of all the academic strengths of open source, but realistically its not a fully proven approach in business, and therefore we have a virtual 'education' exercise for potential users. Beleive me we don't need that to contend with. So how do we describe it. Lower captial investment... less supplier dependence... transparent delivery.. tricky.
d) We also need to think international. Many of the users here are European based. In particular (and no offense in intended) AD's previous marketing 'tone' was whey too gung-ho, we're great, this is fantastic, we know better etc... probably all true, but not necessarily a good style for European business.
e) Do we indeed highlight the past relationship with AD? There are benefits, but/... not all their customers were quite as happy as perhaps was made out, not all their deliveries were really all that good, they did have a bad rep for poor quality and of course they went bump... none of these things are good PR.
f) Who are our 'sponsors' i.e. which individuals within each company are we targetting? Is it product managers, developers, sales, marketing.. its vital to understand this. I'm guessing we're primarily appealing to the development sector at present... but is it they who have the purchasing power etc..
and so on....
Let me have a think about some of these issues and perhaps we could start with some kind of discussion doc... something to get us going..
I'll put together some thoughts, lets knock it around and hopefully we'll have a good start point.
Oh... and just a personal experience/opinion... conferences and stands are usually a pretty big waste of time.. lets face it most people only attend them to get out of the office and it usually turns into competitors nattering to each other..
Cheers
Simon
