Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS Marketing & Promotion Project

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on

It has been suggested several times in past that we look for ways to help promote the OpenACS solution. I am not a "marketing consultant," but I spend a great deal of time marketing & selling my services. I have listed a few "items" that I would like to see on the OpenACS Marketing & Promotion page; many of which came from previous posts. Perhaps you can think of a few more items, we will make a plan, implement it, and in no time we will have more tools to help us promote OpenACS.

  • Keep It SSimple! - anything that takes more than 1-2 minutes to read or explain to the non-technical is wasted
  • a complete list of "powered by logos" for all the tools we use in a library with several sizes from which to choose
  • a brief (1-2 minutes max) marketing blurb on each of the products/tools used (parked next to each logo)
  • links to articles that promote or benefit the tools/products in use
  • links to books that teach or promote the tools
  • testimonials from our clients or contacts
  • a brief list of features of the OpenACS system
  • a brief list of benefits
  • a list of links to bboard threads that are of value, with a brief intro to set the context of the thread
  • a list of sites using OpenACS, including private, personal, public, not-for-profit, and commercial and a brief intro to each. Granted we way not want the general public to access some of the sites, but we should at minimum list them.
  • a list of "Ways to Use OpenACS" or solutions (vertical uses) to give people ideas on how to implement the power of OpenACS
  • a list of key contributors to OpenACS, to give a sense of commitment and volume of usage
  • a list of vendors that offer OpenACS solutions, and their links; with a brief description of what services they offer.
  • links to our press releases
  • a brief history of the OpenACS development
  • a statement on the "stability of OpenACS's future"
  • links or actual presentations used to "sell" or promote OpenACS

I also want to have access to the OpenACS logo image that can be used to imprint hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. OR perhaps we should have the OpenACS ORG offer them at prices that help to support the continuing development effort. I am not a distributor, but I don't mind slapping a UPS label on a few boxes to be distributed in the US; and I have the space to offer storage, and the sources to get the mugs/T-shirts/hats created in the first place.

Yes, I know this is a lot of work, but many of us have already done bits of it here and there. We simply need to compile the information into one location, for all to review and comment on. I find myself having to constantly resell the OpenACS toolkit to my clients, and I have very little collateral to use, other than what I create. And what I create is not as credible as what I can "point my clients" to on the web.

What you may have figured out already, I am suggesting we create a online "Press Kit" that we can direct our clients to or direct our local newspapers, TV, and Radio writers to as well. Some of the projects I am using OpenACS in are big enough to potentially make local news, and I think it makes sense to direct these people to our OpenACS.org/promotion site.

We should also revisit the previous posts related to this issue and extract the great ideas to be added to this list; something I started but did not complete.

Ok, that should get the ball rolling. And, yes, I will be more than happy to help in this project. It will be nice to get it done, so I do not have to keep re-creating my OpenACS selling/marketing e-mails, documents, and presentations. Thanks for your help. -nate

One more thought... if this project is already underway... then please accept this post as a few more ideas and I offer my help, if you want it. -nb

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Posted by Talli Somekh on
Nathan, thanks for the ideas. Since we're redesigning the website (and you can see the site map and bboard thread herehere (https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00029O&topic_id=OpenACS&topic=) I will fold your suggestions into the site map.

talli

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Posted by Don Baccus on
About 90% of your list falls in the category "how to improve this website to make it do a good job of explaining, promoting, and evangelizing our toolkit.
<p>
So I'd forward those portions of the list to Talli Somekh and Musea along with your offer to help create a bunch of the stuff on the list.  Note that a lot of it boils down to writing, searching for relevant information and organizing it so it can be incorporated into the site,  etc.
<p>
Some bits already exist, i.e. there's a link to OpenACS companies on the openacs.org home page, but most bits don't or, when they do, are tucked away in non-obvious places (the logos, for instance).
<p>
Without in *any* way trying to diminish the importance of the kind of stuff you're listing, I think we need to look ahead towards doing more  external marketing at a very basic level.
<p>Here are some things on <b>my</b> list that one or more inspired folk could take on:
<ul>
<li>Build a list of relevant media outlets (magazines, web sites, mailing lists, etc)
<li>Where appropriate, build and maintain a list of editorial contacts  (you have a higher chance of getting stuff published or mentioned if you build relationships with editors)
<li>Create some basic letterhead etc files that people can use to write cover letters and the like to editorial contacts that prefer snail-mail
<li>Take responsibility for making sure that press releases go out reasonably often, whenever major software releases, site launches, and  the like occur
<li>Help people who want to write tech articles but are inexperienced with dealing with the media with the process.  Target media outlets for such articles and whip community members until someone breaks down and agrees to write :)
</ul>
This list isn't complete but I think my focus is obvious - we need someone willing to concentrate on the <b>mechanics</b> of getting the word out.  I've published nature writing and photography in a fairly wide variety of national and regional magazines, and once upon a time ran a software company, and have learned that editors are almost always seeking out quality material to include, not overwhelmed with quality material they must reject.
<p>They get a lot of really bad stuff they can't bear to look at, and a lot of unsolicited stuff that doesn't meet their current editorial needs, but really appreciate stuff that helps them fill pages that need filling.
<p>So, for instance, the difference between getting an article placed or rejected often lies in whether or not you've bothered to check out the magazine's publishing guidelines, schedule etc.
<p>Submitting a PR to a tech magazine the same week MicroSoft announces that XP will be released under the GNU license isn't a great  idea, for instance.  You want to avoid competing with the kind of pre-scheduled events that periodically sweep through the press, which implies developing a calendar with "hit months" for various rags.
<p>So success requires organization, bird-dogging, etc - good mechanics.  I'm sure we can find people here to write stuff, if we had a process in place that would help them with the mechanical side of getting stuff out there.  The nuts-and-bolts marcom-type stuff I'm talking isn't very glamorous or much fun, but is very necessary.
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Posted by David Kuczek on
I was recently talking to an editor of a German business magazin and he said:

- Journalists want a story (no me-too etc., but something special)

- It is a give and take. Whenever you want to have something placed, they would like to know about anything that might interest them on other stories.

- They want to be addressed personally. He mentioned that it would be better to build a relationship to specific editors of interest than spaming out a newsletter.

- Keep it short and simple. Editors don't have time. They will not read more then half a page.

That's all I remember...

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Yes, that echoes my experiences.  Thanks for the "keep it short!" comment - I forgot to mention that golden rule.  Even pre-arranged lengthy material should be prefaced by a very brief cover letter - "here's that world-beating article you requested on the use of OpenACS by New Guinea  headhunters who use it to publicize their prowess on the web" followed by the article itself.

Anyway, the right person or people to take on the role I'm describing will know all this, or be willing to learn quickly!

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Posted by Steve Peterson on

The best marketing that anyone could possibly do is to have the product sell itself and that's provided by a compelling "out-of-the-box" experience. Click here to read the thread discussing this. Anything else is superfluous until you have a product that immediately provides a "WOW!" experience. Obviously I'm advocating a viral marketing approach. The more people you have using the product in a short amount of time, the more people you'll potentially have to work on the other items you've listed above.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
They have to KNOW about the product and FIND the product before they can have ANY out-of-the-box experience, good or bad, don't they?

None of this stuff stands alone...

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Posted by Steve Peterson on

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?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
If you want to see an example of this in action take a look at PHPNuke and its community.
On the other hand, this is the very first time I've heard about PHPNuke. The word-of-mouth approach hasn't managed to spread the word in my direction. Clearly more publicity of this effort couldn't hurt.

MySQL gained popularity compared to modern Postgres in very large part due to a willingness to toot their own horn, while the PG crew didn't see any reason to and did nothing to evangelize their product.

If people don't want to expend effort evangelizing OpenACS, hey, fine with me - I've got plenty of client work. But I think that the "if you build it they will come" approach is a bit naive. Sometimes it is true, far more often it isn't.

Integrate AolServer/OpenACS with Apache
Now ... doing this is a pure marketing play. There's no technical reason to do so.

Writing technical articles (not simply "marketing collatoral") doesn't force unsound engineering decisions on the project, at least ... you're suggesting we skew our engineering decisions for marketing considerations even if the resulting offering's inferior. I find that unsavory.

As far as the poll request, it looks like we're heading back down the path of suggesting that project direction be set by universal sufferage of site registrants, rather than by the people doing the bulk of the work.

Project direction isn't going to be set by polls or votes of this sort, that's certain.

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on

Ooooo, I can feel the energy; good, very good.

Marketing & Promotion _must_ start with a Customer Target (although I do not like this word). Each of us comes from a different perspective and have differing types of Customers and markets, no? For example, I am selling to both the CEOs of multi-million/billion dollar companies who literally make their decisions while smacking little balls around (and who will never and have never "downloaded"), and to the IT managers who are ultimately accountable for the success of the project implementation. Each Customer (type) has _very_ differing sell/requirement strategies. They are the decision makers; unfortunately, the IT hackers (said with respect), who are the end users, _rarely_ get a say.

I think it is safe to say that even aD had to do some heavy duty selling to the executive decision makers before their customers would ever look at a computer screen; a lot of hand waving, seminars and lectures, even if they never used business cards or brochures. I also think it is important to understand that there are as many ways to "promote and sell" your wares as there are people who sell them and customers to sell. I have landed contracts on as little as a handshake, but most of my clients require tangibles they can touch, feel, and lick. I would venture to say that if one System of marketing worked universally, then we could rid the world of all but one of the 10,000 "How to Market and Sell" books that litter the bookshelves at Borders.

I had not even thought about the ideas Don listed regarding selling to the Press, although I have run across (over?) a few press people in the past and found my materials to be lacking, at best. Steve, I think, is thinking of the end user... if I may... who is likely an IT person; where word-of-mouth is a very powerful selling tool, assuming you are working with "open-minded" IT professionals. (Unfortunately, I work in Michigan, home of Ford, Chevy, Olds, Diamler-Chrysler... and my experience with the IT professionals is that they are Bill Gates wanna-be advocates all the way. I only wish word-of-mouth worked better.)

What I listed, up top, would provide me with a powerful tool base to reach my markets, and I think other's like them for other consultants who offer similar services to similar clients. Am I right? Furfly? OpenForce? help?

I have two critical questions, I think must be answered before we can set the right Marketing direction...

  1. Is OpenACS moving the way of a traditional Software Development Company in which they create a product that works out-of-box with numerous vertical applications (skins), and does not require consultants (like me) to implement? A product that targets IT professionals (users) and is so easy to use they simply load and click. If not then...

  2. Who is/are the Customer(s) and audiences that our marketing & promotion efforts should target? Tech Press, non-Tech Press, CxOs, IT Heads, IT Gurus, Nonprofit Orgs, Education (many varieties here), etc.? Each type may require a slightly unique approach and collateral support.

If the answer to #1 is YES, then clearly I will have to complete the marketing materials for my services, while OpenACS will tackle the strategies required to promote & sell to the end user. I will simply leverage off the success of OpenACS in the IT world and show my Execs that "company X did it and you should too, for if not ... you will get stomped." Your thoughts?

My hope in the Community was to share ideas of marketing and promotional strategies for OpenACS, to help OpenACS implementor-people (consultants, users, etc.) sell themselves better, cheaper, faster.. Does this step on too many "proprietary toes" or create fears of client stealing? Anyone? -nate

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Posted by Mat Kovach on
When you starting looking at software like PHPNuke, you are looking at what I think is the second type of slashdot effect.  Since slashdot is popular, software to emulate it will get noticed and used.  Does this mean it should be dismissed, no.  But much of its popularity is based on emulating a popular site and using some popular tools (apache, mysql, php).  Weblogs software of that type is popular now also.  That does give them an advantage in word of mouth, "What does you software do?  We emulate slashdot."  It makes it easier for people to see and understand the software.  Yes, we can point to photo.net for an excellent example, but in terms of developers and web related "mindshare" I believe slashdot is going to have more visability then photo.net.  Whether that is comparing apples and oranges doesn't matter, it is happening.

As we work to get the word out, that is one disadvantage that we have.  Yes we have serveral excellent sites to point to, but they tend not to have the mindshare in the target community (Oh geesh, I've spent too much time with marketing types).  I know I have discussed with a few people before of creating an OpenACS type Sourceforge setup, but due to restrictions the Sourceforge software was used.

Is it time to (while porting to OpenACS 4.x) to start looking at creating a Slashdot/SourceForge/Pick your favorite site clone using OpenACS? to at least have a site comparable to others in the collective mindshare? Maybe so.  I'm currently doing some serious research on the webmail modules (I'm too use to using maildir for webmail and I have to re-think stuff right now) but I'm willing to be a part of such a project, but I also think it would be a bit for one person to do in a timely matter.  I could also be completely wrong :)

But I think in looking why some products/software are seen as being so popular, we also should examine WHY they are seen that way.  At the same time, you have to look at the specific groups are are targeting.

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12: OpenACS logos (response to 1)
Posted by Scott Mc Williams on
Hi Guys...I've been gone for awhile, but I'm really glad to see all of this talk about marketing OpenACS! I'll help as much as possible, but I am kinda swamped right now with 4 major OpenACS projects myself. But...at the very least, I do have all of the original files for the OpenACS logo. So...if someone wants to source out mugs, t-shirts, hats, mouse pads...etc...let me know where to send the artwork!

Cheers,

Scott

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Posted by Steve Peterson on

"... you're suggesting we skew our engineering decisions for marketing considerations even if the resulting offering's inferior. I find that unsavory. "

Absolutely not. Solid engineering on the core and important applications is important. This thread started off as a discussion about marketing and that's where I hope it remains, separate from engineering matters.

"As far as the poll request, it looks like we're heading back down the path of suggesting that project direction be set by universal sufferage of site registrants, rather than by the people doing the bulk of the work.

Project direction isn't going to be set by polls or votes of this sort, that's certain."

Hmm. Sounds like somebody's a little sensative due to another bboard discussion. The motivation behind my requrest is not about setting direction. Its to foster interaction with minimal effort. Its just sometimes easier to set up a poll than to slog through thread after thread on the bboards to get the pulse of the community on a topic. If everybody else is fine with just bboards, that's cool with me.

" On the other hand, this is the very first time I've heard about PHPNuke. The word-of-mouth approach hasn't managed to spread the word in my direction. Clearly more publicity of this effort couldn't hurt."

Or maybe you're so completely focused on this project that you dont notice the competition? Of course I'm glad this is the case since I want to see OpenACS move forward. If you were to poll(there's that word again) the OpenACS community as to what packages would be considered competition to OpenACS for building communities, I'd be very surprised if PHPNuke were not among the leaders. The fact that you haven't heard of the project/software doesn't mean they don't have a large and growing following that's been created by an good out-of-the-box experience. I hope you do a little marketing research on your own in this regard rather than take my word for it.

OpenACS is a fantastic toolbox. As a newbie, its just so frustrating sometimes to have to climb up the learning curve to be able to get it to the point where its look and feel is comparable to other community/bboard packages. Especially when those other packages are so easy to install, get running quickly and look so darn good at the same time. I gathered from this other thread that I'm not the only one who feels this way. I still maintain that the best way to promote this great OpenACS software is to make it easier to use. You might disagree with some of the examples that I used, according to your own tastes, but I dont see anybody saying that giving the OpenACS a better out-of-the-box experience isn't a good idea to promote its adoption, regardless of your target audience.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I guess we are talking about two different people we want to market the ACS to. The end user is happy to download the stuff, test it out, get a feel for it and cry, YES, that's my baby.
On the other hand, if you want to impress compnanies (at least the decision making guys), having a software to test is not going to work (way to busy, these people, checkout http://www.dilbert.com/). You need nice borchures, articles, reviews, tests done by other people. Oh yeah, and be buzzword complient. Well, I think getting OpenACS to be buzzword complient might work with Postgres, but definitly not with AOLServer and TCL. Should we change the platform and move to apache? NO WAY. I mean, why should we settle for a probably technically inferior approach. We just need to learn how to play this game with the small white balls.

I talked to a publisher yesterday. He would be willing to talk to me/us about publishing a book about OpenACS. Someone needs to write it, but getting a book out might be better than having just plain user dokumentation.

Where are all the articles which deal with OpenACS? I don't think everything that has been written around OpenACS can be found at https://openacs.org/press/ or elsewhere on the site. So dig in you harddrive, look for articles which could be used to make the point for OpenACS and post them to the site.

Once OpenACS 4 is in beta we should start building the RPMs and post them to places like zdnet, freshmeat, announce at slashdot and various linux user communities. That way you get users to look at it, editors will see how often the product have been downloaded, get interested, talk to Ben or other people, get even more impressed and write a fancy little article stating OpenACS rules.

If you hear about people making tests for comparison in the area of Knowledge Management, E-Learning, Community Software, E-Commerce shopping solution,... you name it, point them to OpenACS to have a look at the system for evaluation and comparison.

That's all for now, back to my exams.

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15: Marketing Defined (response to 1)
Posted by Adam Farkas on
These threads about "marketing" feel a little bit nebulous to me. There are lots of good ideas, but I think everyone should take a step back to think about what marketing really is, and how it can be used to enhance the OpenACS.

Marketing is _not_ just advertising/PR. It has two components, inbound and outbound.

"Inbound Marketing" involves talking to people who use a product, figuring out what they want, and altering the specifications of your product to match their needs. (Developing the "value proposition")

"Outbound Marketing" refers to the act of building awareness of your product through promotion, advertising, etc..

These are two very different activities, yet in business both are usually necessary to achieve a successful result.

There has been a great focus in this thread on Outbound Marketing -- that is, how best to communicate to the world that OpenACS exists, how it works, and documenting what kinds of problems it solves.

This is excellent -- without outbound marketing, the only way people are going to find out about OpenACS is through luck (stumbling on it) or word of mouth. WOM is necessary, but rarely sufficient for success. (Projects like Napster are the exception, not the rule.)

My big worry - for OpenACS and for virtually all open source projects that i've seen - is the almost complete lack of inbound marketing.

That is, projects are built & tossed into the marketplace with very little research done into what end-users really _want_. Instead, the people who build the projects often make assumptions about their end-users (that their needs are the same as _my_ needs), with disasterous results.

This includes successful projects like PHP-Nuke. The authors of Nuke probably said to themselves "wouldn't it be cool to have slashdot-in-a-box, that any joker can set up in 5 minutes." I doubt they asked many people if it was a good idea. They just started building and hoped that people were happy with the outcome.

In their case, they were fairly successful. They were able to intuit a need in the marketplace, and filled the need accordingly.

However, go to sourceforge and look at the projects. It's like an burned out ghetto or wasteland: most projects there have failed, or are destined to fail. This is likely because they were useful to the individual who started the project, but not all that useful to many other people. Had the project leader done any sort of due diligence or examination of the marketplace, they could have saved themselves from a public failure. Or at least not wasted their time.

What does this have to do with OpenACS?

The OpenACS was derived from a product, the ACS, that itself was the result of ArsDigita building a few web sites for a limited selection of clients (travel agencies, photography sites).

The folks at ArsDigita thought that this framework and code could be extended to _all_ types of sites. They did very little inbound marketing (focus groups, interviews, etc.) to see what people in the broader market might want or need. There was a heavy focus inward on their "product", built as a result of previous engagements.

Larger, external trends were being ignored. (Take a look at the ACS -- all that code represents something that was used in the past. There is very little that's innovative, forward-looking, or "unique" about it. This might change with ACS 5. If it doesn't, the company will have major issues.)

I'm worried that OpenACS could meet a similar fate.

Jerry's "coup", or plan for a steering committee, was actually (IMO) a somewhat stilted attempt to bring inbound marketing into the project. That is, he was asking that customer requirements (clients, end-users, other web developers) be used to drive future decisions about the direction of the project, instead of being dictated solely by the needs of the developers in the community.

I do not disagree with him in theory. Good inbound marketing improves the chances for success of any project. However, he was a bit premature for two reasons:

First, OpenACS 4 is still vaporware! The focus should be on just getting _something_ running. Don's "shut-up-and-keep-porting" attitude is probably the correct one, at this stage. Once the basics are in place, and the core product is running, then I think the inbound marketing issue should be reassessed.

Second, it's not clear to me who the "customer" for OpenACS _is_. Is it the end-user? Is it paying clients? A handful of nerds? Who is this product really being built _for_?

Once that question is clearly answered to everyone's satisfaction, crafting an attractive value proposition becomes possible, and I predict the number of squabbles will drop. The odds of building a successful, sustainable project with broad appeal rise dramatically.

rambling MBA-talk over and out.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Adam, I think the main problem with answering your question is, that OpenACS as a TOOLKIT can take many forms. ACS itself was never destinied for the end user. The Oracle licence made it questionable to use the system. But what is the end user anyway?
  • Wants to have a website running which is capable of things he could not get at Strato (cheap webhoster with predefined scripts to use).
  • Does not want to pay much more than he is currently paying.
  • Likes to hear himself talking (maybe 😉).
  • Features would include (IMHO):
    • Bookmarks.
    • General comments, maybe general ratings.
    • BBoard.
    • File-Storage ?
If we need to have an out of the box solution for this customer type (which is now in the realm of possibility thanks to postgres), I think it would be easier to offer these services like Philip did with his free services (now maintained by aD). On the other hand, give them an RPM which is targeted to run those services out of the box (linked from the first page, clear location of a master template {or even multiple ones, of which he could choose, something like skins for Winamp}). And make it a windows installer file too. Why? End-Users use Windows.

I could probably state something to each of the customer types, but in my impression, OpenACS will be primerily for:

  1. Clients, whose problems can be solved with OpenACS .
  2. Service providers, who run services like the ACS offers (e.g. an E-Commerce portal for small retailers in Cape Cod).
  3. Nerds, who like to run a cool website.
Therefore, whom should we ask for inbound marketing? Clients. If I'm not entirely mistaken, the approach OpenACS based service companies are taking is to look at the client needs and build this into the product. So, we do have inbound marketing. Yes, it would be nice to get bboard up to the functionality of Ultimate BBoard (http://www.infopop.com/products_ov.html). But do clients really ask for this? As long as they don't, why bother coding something like this.

Getting 4.0 out of the vaporware state should be our foremost concern {concerning the community}. Therefore people who are able to code should follow Dons streamlined efforts to get the product out. But hey, we should not start thinking about the marketing once the product is finished. Talking to an editor saying, OpenACS was released one month ago is not NEWs. Think about how long it took aD to relaunch the company, how much preperation it took {how little it yielded}. You can't just go out saying, hey look, here is my product, its so great. Create curiosity in advance, raise expectations and then deliver what you promised (unlike microsoft).

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on
Thank you Adam! You have once again helped us step out of the "muck"
to take a view of the Big Picture. I did not consider adding ideas
related to the "inbound" component of marketing for OpenACS as it is
something I do every day, by watching how my customer's use their
solutions, asking them what they want, assessing their long term
goals, budgets, etc. My focus groups are my clients and their actual
work environments.

But again, I am talking from a Consultant's perspective, in that, my
clients are people who have never heard of OpenACS, or PHPNuke, or in
many cases Slashdot, Apache, or Zope. (Hard to believe, but these are
simply not topics that get discussed at the "T" with my clients.) As a
consultant, it is my job to do the "inbound marketing" and formulate a
solution that meets their needs/expectations. The collateral to which
I originally refer, goes into my "Grab Bag of Marketing and Sales
Objection" tricks. I never know what issues a client might bring up;
i.e. A question I received this morning asked me "Has OpenACS ever
been published in a major magazine?" and they meant Forbes, Money,
Inc., FastCompany, etc. Has it? Help! Don? Can we leverage off of ACS
publishings?

The "inbound marketing" idea is an excellent point, and essential for
the success of the OpenACS: Click-n-Use-Out-of-the-Box Solution. My
successful clients regularly research using "inbound marketing"
techniques, and those that are failing or have failed did not; they
never stopped to ask the customer what they want or need. In a sense,
if I am a "customer" to OpenACS (and I consider myself one), are you
(the OpenACS Community) not providing a forum to voice my needs and
expectations... is this not a form of "inbound" marketing? Funny, now
that I think on it, several of the OpenACS solutions I have created
result in "inbound marketing" for my clients. Perhaps this is another
"Solution" we can chalk up to OpenACS.

Again, Adam tells us to define our customer, and I agree. So set your
sights on me as a Web-Based Training Developer AND a Web Based KM
Consultant (or perhaps just a "Custom Database-Backed Web Applications
Hacker" but don't tell my clients this for it will scare them), and
then use my previous discussions as the results of a 1 person focus group!

Malte: Does my "consultant" situation fit into one of the three
primary customer types you referenced? Are there enough Web
Consultant/Developers using OpenACS to warrant a separate
classification? Would a Usage Poll makes sense? (If consultants do not
fit the customer model, this would explain why my marketing
suggestions may not fit the future direction of OpenACS, in which case
I have some serious decisions to make.)

Adam: In your experience... what do you think would be a good way to
start the "inbound" research for the open-install-click-run users?
What are your thoughts on who the best audience(s) is to target for
the longevity and exponential growth of OpenACS? How do you suggest we
determine the "top three" customer targets for OpenACS, assuming we
choose three?

-nate

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Nathan, I was not actually defining people like you and me (consulting and implementing using ACS based technologies) as customers. Because we are not the ones using OpenACS in the end, we are providing and recommending it for our clients. On the other hand, I think our group is the one who can have a deep inpact on the distribution of OpenACS. Should we define Consultants as a seperate group? Probably yes, but why? I see consultants as the extended opinion of the customers. At least that's the way it should be (IMHO). Though I've to agree that I think a lot about how I could convince my friends and their seniors at accenture or PWC to have a look at (Open)AC(E)S to supplement Lotus Notes installations or even go with OpenACS instead of Notes. In that regard I realized it is necessary to give them an easy way to look at the system, like a demo site. And give figures how long it takes to implement a site running with OpenACS. How far it can scale, what are further advantages over the proven concepts. As licence fee does not count for their customers in comparison to the rates they bill per hour the only thing which could convince is the ease of setup of a site and the quick learning curve how to adapt OpenACS.

Coming back to the original question, if we want to see consultants seperate from their clients {and I don't want to make a definitive judgement on this), we should add them as a fourth group. But will the requirements be that much different in comparison to what we need to do in regards to marketing for clients. I doubt it, but I'd love to hear more from consultants like you, jerry and michael, or implementors like janine, ben or tally {don't feel yourself stepped on your toes when I put you in the wrong category or not both).

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Posted by Don Baccus on
I'm glad to see this discussion take a positive turn ... Ben and I would like to figure out some way to chain Adam to a stake and make him do marketing thinking for us 24 hours a day, but he's a slippery devil with a job :)

I think most of us are thinking along similar lines. My first post was just an incomplete attempt to make clear that you need some basic marketing communication machinery in place before you can hope to implement any higher-level strategy. I'm certainly not suggesting that running the machinery in an undirected fashion would help. Then again, great ideas with no underlying machinery available for implementation won't help, either.

And I'm not discounting WOM, which is extremely important. I just don't think it is any where near the entire answer.

A question I received this morning asked me "Has OpenACS ever been published in a major magazine?" and they meant Forbes, Money, Inc., FastCompany, etc. Has it? Help! Don? Can we leverage off of ACS publishings?
The Economist ran a long article on the use of Knowledge Management tools within Siemens, over the internet. We know that aD put together such a system for Siemens. I assume that's what the article's about (Malte?). If true, that's an interesting datapoint - it's not OpenACS, but it's the ancestor of OpenACS (of course, we don't have that KM stuff but we're sure talking a lot about doing something along those lines!)

Anyway, Malte or someone should confirm but if it was indeed the aD stuff that was being discussed in the article it's the highest-profile piece that talks about the ACS that I know of, though it's indirect and never mentions the vendor, at least not that I saw.

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Posted by Adam Farkas on
Hi Nate!

I think before we undertake any inbound marketing efforts, we really should clarify & agree upon the different classes of "OpenACS Customers", then systematically attack the problem.

But as an example, to research the "Point, Click & it's running" crowd, i'd probably decide what we think the ACS would be useful for (ie, an out-of-the-box weblog, lets say.) Then go over to the communities where those people hang out (http://www.phpnuke.org/ wouldn't be a bad start, as it's the most popular weblog software available.)

Examine what people are asking for, which plug-in modules are popular, etc. Listen closely to the things that people are bitching about because those become areas of important product differentiation.

If you see a person on those discussion groups that looks reasonable, you may even want to ping him directly, and ask him a few questions about why he uses Nuke, and what things he'd like to see in a nuke-like product. Point him to openacs.org. If he recoils in horror, find out why.

Again, before we do this type of thing, I think we all need to agree upon the different classes of OpenACS "customers."

(BTW -- You still in Ann Arbor? we should hit art fair this weekend)

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21: Articles about (Open)ACS (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I have not read the article myself, so no clue. But if it is about KM within Siemens, then it is most likely the ShareNet project, as this one even won an award. And yes, it is based on ACS TCL. Other publications I know of are mostly in Germany (Linux Magazin, Linux Enterprise, Manager Magazin, some interviews with the new german CEO and myself appeared in various places). So, press has at least heard about it. Marketing for KM and ACS has been done on the Linuxday and we are looking at some more options to market ACS and flavours over here. Well, could Tally open the press module and make it possible to post press releases and book contributions there?

Furhermore I found some interesting Articles related to OpenACS at knowledgegarden.org. Well, maybe we should put a link from OpenACS to those articles (or even better post them at OpenACS.org business bboard which hopefully will be created). Any other, or do I need to run through google to get a list?

Oh yeah, I hear so many people talking about actively running sites with OpenACS. How about success stories. If you don't want to write them, ask your customer. If he does not, I think we can find people in the community who will. And remeber, this is also marketing for yourself, if we put success stories at OpenACS which you helped create.

Sorry for not just answering Don's question, but it seems I'm in a talkative mood today 😉

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Posted by David Kuczek on
There is an article on Siemens KM (also mentioning "ShareNet") at ebusinessforum, which is part of the economist group... it is even a "Best Practice".

http://www.ebusinessforum.com/index.asp?layout=rich_story&doc_id=3590

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Posted by Don Baccus on
The Economist ran this article as part of a series which I think was entitled "Best Practices".  The intent seemed to be to show that though  the dot had bombed, real companies were having great success using the internet/web to do real work.

I'm certain now that it was ShareNet that was written about.

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on
Does it make sense to create a "pool" of articles (links) that relate
to the use and success of web-community tools used to enhance/improve
Business, Gov't, Schools, etc. in general? Tools that are not
necessarily OpenACS, or are not discussed at all; just the concepts?

I use these types of articles everyday with my clients... to help them
see the power and possibility of web communities at their orgs. For
example: the NFL has recently contracted to build an online CRM
solution, using web-community like tools. (I will find the article.)

What do you think? Is this another Marketing idea? Yes, it is
indirect, but it never hurts to educate the world on the power of web
communities, as long as we point the customer back to OpenACS. -Nate

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Posted by David Kuczek on
Maybe the new openacs.org should have a place that allows people to contribute links to all kinds of interesting articles in a categorized way.

This would be the openacs.org media library, which could parallely be filled with articles that members wrote on certain topics.

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on
I wonder... how many pages/features have we added to the new
OpenACS.org web site? Anyone counting?

I want to thank all those who have made contributions to this thread,
as this topic is important to me. It warms the soul to know there are
others who have an keen interest. I also want to encourage those who
have not dropped a post yet, to please take a minute to share your ideas.

I am slowly working through the bboard archives, to gather ideas that
were missed, so we have as complete a resource as possible for
Marketing & Promotion ideas of OpenACS. If any of the aDers want to
add links to articles/threads that support this discussion, please do
so; as I doubt I will research the aD archives.

Yet another question(s), perhaps premature, but it should be asked at
some point...

We have a great deal of ideas and issues presented above. What is
next? What needs to happen to make the Marketing/Promo OpenACS project
a reality? What decisions need to be made, and by whom? Where do I
sign up to help? As I said, it may be too soon to ask, but I am not
too good at being patient. Thanks in advance. -Nate

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Posted by Don Baccus on
A good place to start would be to inventory the ideas, such as you're doing, and if you have time add specifics (for example published articles that have been mentioned), and categorize stuff (website, people tasks, etc).

An outline such as that would serve as a good starting place for further discussion, perhaps?

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Posted by Steve Peterson on

Nate,

If you're going to categorize the articles you collect I think there's been a valuable point made in this discussion that will help. Given that there is more than one constituency(end user/webmaster, consultants, etc) that will be browsing your material it would be helpful to know who you're addressing in your categorization. And conversely, how your categorization serves these constituencies. This all comes back to the issue of defining the target consumers for your end product. Some of the consumer constituencies mentioned in this thread:

End users
Developers/Consultants
Business/IT management

are probably a decent start but there may be other important constituencies not listed here.

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Posted by Nathan Bogo on
OK, sounds great! I will finish my research of bboard archives and
sort out the results. Next I will compose a project plan, with what I
hear and think are the priorities, tasks, and milestones. I will make
sure to clearly
indicate the assumptions, so others will understand my perspective.
Then I will wave my magic wand, say a few prayers, sacrifice a mouse
and walla! Umm, well, you get the point.

I'll start plugging on this early next week, for my weekend plans do
not include touching anything that even resembles a computer. I hope
to return on Monday to find lots more ideas and links. Have a great
weekend. -Nate

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Posted by Branimir Dolicki on
Don,

Yes, the ShareNet KM system mentioned in the Economist article http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=638605 is an ACS Tcl based system entirely developed and maintained by our Munich ArsDigita team.

ShareNet is probably the most important KM System at Siemens - the only one the Siemens CEO mentioned in the last year's press conference: http://w4.siemens.de/en2/html/press/pk_eb/pierer_rede.html

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Posted by Adam Farkas on
branimir said:
ShareNet is probably the most important KM System at Siemens - the only one the Siemens CEO mentioned in the last year's press conference: http://w4.siemens.de/en2/html/press/pk_eb/pierer_rede.html

ShareNet is no doubt an important system, and is useful to point to as an example of (open)ACS capabilities, but I just stumbled across this:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/010724/sftu102.html

"Siemens Standardizes on Interwoven Content Infrastructure"

"Interwoven will allow Siemens to apply an assortment of different system configurations with a single Content Infrastructure that will enable us to advance e-Business processes, creating a major productivity boost,'' said Albert Goller, corporate vice president, Siemens Center of E-Excellence."

"In April, Interwoven announced its new Content Infrastructure product suite that includes products for content aggregation, content collaboration, content management, content intelligence and content distribution. For more information, please see http://www.interwoven.com/company/features/ci/."

So... It looks like any new initiatives at Siemens will be using Interwoven as a basic building-block. Standardizing initiatives across the entire corporation does make sense (though one could question the efficacy of the tool that they've picked.)

Anyway, just giving you a heads-up, in case you find yourself discussing siemens with someone...