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.
