Malte, I agree with you 100%. I don't get too many opportunities
to speak about furfly; we haven't attended any conferences yet.
But when I do talk about work we've done I try to do it from the
perspective of "look what the ACS can do", not "look what we
did".
I started out doing this because I was taught to be modest about
my accomplishments, and I've always been uncomfortable with
the "toot your own horn as loudly as you can whenever possible"
mentality that business seems to require. But lately I've been
thinking about it from a different perspective, which this
conversation fits nicely with.
We've spent many an evening here at furfly HQ brainstorming
about how to promote furfly. If we were going to spend money on
marketing, what would be most effective? It's a hard question to
answer, and we know it's hard for a lot of companies like ours
because we've had others approach us asking for our marketing
advice, when we had none to give.
Most of our clients so far have been people who read Philip's
book, got religion but couldn't afford aD, and went in search of a
company who could build them a site. However, Philip's book is
aging and his future association with the ACS is unlikely, so we
can't rely on that for much longer.
So let's see... we all need to promote our businesses but aren't
sure how, and the ACS has been an effective promotion tool for
us but it's effectiveness may be waning. It's a pretty small jump
to the idea that promoting OpenACS could help us all.
