Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Marketing and Advocacy

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8: Re: Marketing and Advocacy (response to 1)
Posted by Ben Koot on
Here's how I try to market my OACS service.

Maybe marketing the system is not the correct term. I have just started an OACS weblog in which I share information with my potentential clients. It gives tips for end users, and allows for peoeple to try out things. My main market is the travel industry, and I hope that by motivating endusers to open a timedesk account,and provide a clear message as what the featurs & benefits are (this are often minute details, that can add great value)over competing services. I notice that the development crowd tends to believe that each feature needs a new developmet effort. In reality much is a simple matter of fine tuning based on user experience.

I prefer not refer end users to the OACS forum, and the weblog makes it much more effective to keep the audience stay tuned.

From a markting point of view you could even argue that the discussions going on there not allways add to motivating companies to choose OACS. I understand I am in muddie waters now, but hanging out all laundry and trying to created a pretty marketing picture seems to be a contradiction.

The weblog keeps track of all questions I recieve on how to do specific tasks using the toolkit. On top of that each customer is provided with a personal How to (ETP) section, which contains a custom helpdesk. Instead of offering all "raw" discussions, I try to reduce the amount of text to the absolute minimum.

Idealy it would prefer to have the weblog on an end duser OACS.org subsite "Industry applications", sub category Travel. If we would do this with more markets, the toolkit will "sell" itself. It also offers a more flexible showcase of OASC service companies than the current list.

The only costs involved seem to be hosting for the subsite, and keepeeing the content lively. Well if endusers can ask their questions per blog entry, that shouldn't be to complicated. I thing listing the the subsite blog on daypop and the other blog reference services will get ball roling. Especially if we come up with a showstopper similar to http://basecamphq.com/buzz

What if we could use the enduser subsite as an environment where technical discussions like the apache issue is made irellevant, by simply providing a fully fuctional virtually hosted environment at a set rate. Once people have had the opertunity to play around, what now seems to be the bottleneck, apache/aol is than reduced to filling in the blanks, because I = enduser/ ceo/ system admin. WANT this technology.

Just my 2 cents

Ben

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41: Deleted (SPAM) (response to 8)
Posted by shafek&celine gobran on
Deleted (SPAM)