[OGo-Discuss] Re: Thoughts on marketing

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >>/Or perhaps not...  Is it a fishing trip 
> />>that isn't worth the price of the bait
> >Certainly is worth the trouble.  What specifically do you have in mind
> >Personally I think the best marketing is always good documentation.  At 
> >least at first.  Steering people towards something that then isn't 
> >documented usually fails.
>   Documentation is a part of it...  and I certainly intend to help there.
> There are a number of marketing concepts/rules-of-thumb and "painting
> the steps" is one.  ie. highlighting what the "customer" wants to do so
> it's easy for them, and also highlighting the steps involved for them to
> do what YOU want...  

Well.... I want them to send me bundles of cash.  Crisp large
denominations preferably. :)

> Clear and simple beginner documentation is of course
> important,and...(?)  

As a note, in case you missed it, there is the beginnings of a *USER*
guide at
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/docs/ogo-userguide-0.9.pdf There
was a plone site related to the manual project but it now seems defunct.
Even loading the document fails for me,  but I have a copy about
somewhere.

> Marketing a commercial product might involve
> introducing extensions to the current product, and marketing related
> products.  Skyrix would want to do this...  but for the OSS project?

I'd concentrate thinking about the OSS project;  whatever a commercial
entity decides to do or not do is simply what they decide to do or not
do.  Entirely outside our brief.

> Perhaps strategic invitations for help with packaging and docs?  

I'm not sure what a "strategic invitations" is, but if it means just
contacting people and asking them to help I can promise you an
astronomical failure rate.  Of course, asking is also free, so...

> Perhaps pointers to commercial help? 

Already provided.

> What does OGo and its supporters need?  

Developers, developers, and more developers. :)  Seriously.  OGo is a
great product but the pace of development is nearly stagnant.   One of
the most important factors in a project acquiring both new users and new
developers is to have strong life signs,  so you get into a kind of
chicken / egg situation.  

<aside>And OGo has strong and well-entrenched proprietary competitors
which many successful projects and project spaces don't really have.
The kinds of environments likely to provide developers and spawn
feedback are also quite likely to be the kinds of sites that can easily
afford [or already have] M$-Exchange / Domino / etc...</aside>

Of course development is facilitated by documentation.  Currently
developing in / around OGo involves a great deal of grunt work where one
has to reverse engineer and deconstruct what is going on in the existing
code base.  I've come to be quite fond of Objective-C with it's bundles
and categories.... but those same features can also make figuring out
where the *@&&^$@ behavior is coming from quite exasperating.

>   I remember another important concept.. that is - every person involved
> should understand that they are part of the "public image", and it's
> important that they understand that marketing is (and already has been!)
> part of their role by default.  I guess this folds back to the
> "collective understanding" thing.

Eh,  I'm not much for terms like "collective understanding", but I don't
think we have much of a problem with cranky or off-putting behavior
here.

Also marketing a product, implying that you have resources to throw at
the problem, is quite different than marketing a project where you have
nothing more than volunteered resources.  I just don't think much from A
carries over to B,  having seen this type of thread in various places
several times.

>   Hmmm...  I also remember something about demographically breaking
> down your market so you can think about how to target subgroups.  I'm
> sure most people have abilities the project could use...  even novice
> users - eg. project advocacy.

It isn't what skills people have or don't have,  it is a question of
what skills [and the related time] they are interested in investing in
the project.

>   Anyway, I was only trying to stimulate discussion about what the
> people making up the project want, and discussing if it's possible
> and useful for "marketing" to be another tool in the bag.