Vienna Marketing Workshop Update

Hello Plone Evangalists,

I want to take a moment to introduce you all to the people who attended
the Marketing workshop in Vienna, and are now on board this mailing list:

Matt Lee <mattl@...>
Sune Tatt <sune@...>
Scott Hilleard <scott@...>
Adian McGuire <amcguire@...>
Erick Litswa <erick.litswa@...>
Salim Fadhley <salimfadhley@...>
Francesco Ciriaci <francesco@...>
Armin StroB-Radschinski <developer@...>
Bryan Jordin <bryan@...>
Russ Ferriday <russf@...>
Fabrizio Reale <fabrizio.reale@...>
Xavier Heymans <xavier@...>

For those you are inclined to good old fasioned nntp readers, or live
their lives through rss aggregators, I want to remind everyone that this
mailing list is also readable on gmane -
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.marketing

The workshop lasted for 2 full sessions, and we had quite a
turnout (a dozen+ people). This gathering continues to demonstrate that
there are plenty of non-developers who are interested and capable in
actively contributing the Plone ecology, and we need to convert this
enthusiasm and momentum into actual deliverables. Special thanks to 
Adian for compiling working minutes during our
workshop.

We began the workshop with the brainstorming exercise discussed on this
list a few weeks back -
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.marketing/34 -- the
responses were diverse, and corroborate the idea that our constituents
and clients come from varied enough sectors that our marketing strategy
needs to be eminently "skinnable" - that is, multi-layered in such a way
that the core ideas can be wrapped and assembled according to views that
speak to the specific verticals.

(My personal favorite '06 headline was "Slashdot moves to Plone" 
resulting in the obvious consequence - "getting Ploned")

One candidate for this core message continues to be the Plone Ecology -> 
[Software, Community, Processes] theme.
One way of capturing this message is with our anthropomorphic Plone 
campaigns (expressing implicitly the idea that software has a personality)
And this idea, can in turn be skinned as a personal ad, a job interview, 
and perhaps others.

Prior to any of these cutesy implementations, it will be important for 
us to provide the meat of these campaigns so that frontline vendors can 
assemble these feature sound bites into traditional formats.

Aside from the usual suspects (case studies, feature matricies, 
tuturial/marketing movies, collaborative working space) discussed in our
workshop, the idea for a Marketing sprint (or at least a parallel track 
of a larger sprint) was floated a few times.

On the "infrastructure" side, I think we made some interesting progress 
considering the ways in which decision making is often an emotional 
process, not a rational one. This led us to begin to work on a list of 
the core values that we associate with Plone - the project, and this 
list might also form a central component of our core marketing message 
(see the minutes below for the list, but I also plan to assemble this 
list on our new workspace).

Finally, Whit and I conferred on the hosting plans, and thanks to David 
Sapiro and Pilot Systems, we will be building a plone instance to be 
used for this type of collaboration and more. Following the lead of 
plone.net, this initial site will be functionally minimal (no plone.org 
auth integration, no fancy skin, etc) - release early, release often, right?

Minutes Below:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Brain storming** *

in one years time headline

Plone swallows its four main competitors

Company xyz fortune 500 adopts plone

Plone becomes enterprise class cms

ibm migrating to plone

its official plone takes no 1 place in oss cms

plone

eu recommends plone as standard for gov

slasdot adopts plone

un adopts resolution that orgs use plone

plone contents workflow Beats

*back to issue – what is plone*

how to position the software

agree key concepts – to convey

single minded proposition

with hooks that would appeal to different groups

what assumptions do we take for granted that our audience

core infrastructure

dealing with oss / dealing with cms

firefox – evalgelising

“the browser that does not suck”

describing the elephant

you have to boil the thing down -

lets make it as simple as we can

what is the USP of plone

product vision statement

elevator pitch

jim high smith – vision statement

opportunity to

alter the dimensions

cms as a word its – cms+

what is our target?

Who is your audience
What is your message

in denmark – small number of developers

more developers -

idea plone could be in use everywhere

to have a strategy for the foundation to force contacts with plone

looking for usp

comparison chart -

marketing sprint –

un agencies

young kids are getting starting with php at age 13

documentation

progression of technologies

getting into a linux distribution

*Conceptual Model*

perceived plone landscape – all about software

what we are missing is the processes / people / community / foundation

plone success stories

case studies

project reports

question from customer

what is the solution

what was special

we have a template -

there is a plone.org bottleneck

set up mailing list for some collaborative space

cms matrix

Return to the subject

“personal ad”

embarking on a project – u are joining a community

plone is being hired for a job

software has a community

emotional level

human interest story

we don't set the story for cms decision maker

discussion about hooks

plone as a person

the hook must catch several groups

messages that can be skinned

what are the values

freedom
good society
democracy
egalitarian
independent
networking
meritocracy
honesty
elegant
open
flexibility
fun quick
friendship
collaboration

openminded for new/unknown solution, intersted in finding new and better 
ways of doing cmf stuff
quick solution finder for specific prob.

Plone is becoming less friendly

early adopters - ??

easy to use as an end user