InitMarketing teamed up with Olliance Group and we’ll present a workshop entitled Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy at Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference, Berlin, September 19th. My fellow Roberto already posted some details about the OSiM workshop.

I got some 25% discount vouchers for the conference (valid until Friday, Sept 5th) - shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll get one to you.

InitMarketing is now a member of Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF). OSBF is a European-wide Open Source network founded by Richard Seibt of SUSE fame. The activities of the network focus on the business benefits of Open Source software. The members of OSBF are companies, institutions, VCs and persons inspired by open source software - all together over 120 to date.

There are plenty of useful working groups within OSBF, such as:

• With the Open Source Business Award, OSBF annually awards innovative ideas, concepts and promising business plans.
• The Campus Coaches provide member companies their diverse professional experience free of charge.
• The COSAD working group develops best practice guidelines for OSS.
• The OSBF Embedded project fosters the use of OSS, especially Linux in embedded systems.
• Just recently, OSBF started a sales and marketing project that InitMarketing is a core member of.

In only two years since OSBF’s birth, it has established itself as probably the most important interest group for OSS businesses with a strong footprint in Germany and a growing attraction all over Europe.

Flo of OpenOffice.org fame just pinged me via email and asked if I knew anyone who would be interested in exhibiting together with them at Systems trade fair. This is what he writes in his Weblog:

OpenOffice.org will exhibit at the Systems trade show in Munich, which takes place from October 21th to 24th, one month after the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. If you are offering products, services or software related to OpenOffice.org, you are welcome to co-exhibit with us at our booth. Booth management, organization and marketing will be done by the association OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.

Given that OOo 3.0 will be released shortly before Systems, I guess there will be quite a hype. Hence, if you are in the OOo business in one or the other way, this seems like a great opportunity to raise your visibility.

Find more information and how to contact Flo in his post about the exhibiting opportunity with OOo at Systems.

In parallel with the new Magnolia 3.6 release, Magnolia International Ltd. also launched the new Magnolia website. InitMarketing helped Magnolia with re-structuring and re-writing the content.

The overarching goal was to make all existing information more comprehensible, thereby achieving better communication of the brand “Magnolia”. Furthermore, the new website includes more information beneficial to the Magnolia community such as the new Magnolia Newsletter.

InitMarketing worked together with Swiss designer Andrea Heinzer for example on creating the front page banner. Andrea was in charge of designing the whole website and she obviously did a fantastic job.

InitMarketing is particularly proud that we achieved this milestone together with the folks at Magnolia and enjoyed working with them on the new website very much. The Magnolia ecosystem can expect some more good things to happen marketing-wise…

This summer, we spent a few days at Lake Bled in Slovenia. My brother’s wedding took place in this truly romantic scenery. Great location!

German PHP Magazin published an article written by myself with some guidelines how to market Open Source software based on PHP. Grab the current issue 5.2008 and check out the article entitled “Auf die offene Art”.

Today, we re-launched the corporate website of InitMarketing with a new design:

Our new website has been designed by Wira, who also won the InitMarketing logo contest. Much like in the spirit of Open Source, the discussions around the website design took place in our public InitMarketing forum. The designed was turned into a Drupal theme by the always helpful people at Gloscon.

Hope you like the design!

Currently, customers at InitMarketing are solely companies who want us to support them in marketing their Open Source product. Yet, we do not work for community-driven Open Source projects which usually have an association or foundation as an organizing body.

The reason is quite simple: Associations or foundations which we have been in touch with lack money and business-focused decision-making processes. It seems to be much easier for companies to provide a sufficient marketing budget and to agree on a focused marketing strategy.

The cause mainly lies in how differently the two ecosystems are structured.

Company-driven Open Source Ecosystem

An Open Source company acts as the hub in its self-created ecosystem and can leverage all business advantages which stem from its superior knowledge of the product, copyright, etc.

Community-driven Open Source Ecosystem

Community-driven ecosystems lack a business hub. Usually the core of the community is focused on further developing the source code.

Pros and Cons: Company vs. Community

Company Community Decision making Defined reporting structures and decision makers Meritocratic community, maybe with benevolent dictator Motivation Business-oriented, want to make money Individuals who enjoy coding good software Communication Partially confidential Highly transparent

Of course, this is an overly simplistic comparison table. I know, there are companies that are pure chaos compared with some well working communities. Also, companies might employ their best community members over time which makes it impossible to draw a clear line between community and company. And so on… Nevertheless, the above mentioned points allow to understand the impact of the fundamental differences between a company- and a community-driven ecosystem on marketing, which I’ll discuss next.

Impact on Marketing

Communities trying to reach broad consensus will have a hard time focusing their marketing activities e.g. to clearly position their OSS project, because this requires bold decisions to spend the available budget on a specific target audience only. The higher an OSS project is in the software stack, the more this becomes a problem due to the fact that they need to attract end users and pragmatic buyers.

Open Source companies see a constant need to raise visibility through marketing to achieve better lead generation. Quite contrary, some core developers in communities might have strong prejudices against marketing and especially public relations (of course, the same can happen within a company, but the business prerogative will prevail). Additionally,  Then again, communities are quite good in spreading the word among peers.

Preparing a marketing budget is a serious issue for communities. They could collect it from system integrators who are part of the community, but they might want to invest the bulk of their marketing budget into pushing their own specific solutions and services. Nevertheless, if the main beneficiaries of an OSS project financially support general marketing efforts of the community, they will profit not only from shared development, but also from shared marketing costs.

Shared marketing is especially helpful if the OSS project is rather a platform or framework instead of an out-of-the-box solution. The danger is that community members tend to have varying views on an OSS platform. Different system integrators will use it to implement different custom solutions. The OSS project could potentially mean anything to anyone, which runs counter a sound positioning in the heads of potential new developers and customers.

In general, it is very important for OSS communities to educate themselves when it comes to marketing, which includes open discussions that result in clear decisions. While the OSS market continues to grow, so will competition. More Open Source communities will eventually take a closer look at how marketing can help them to distinguish themselves from the competition.

The Perspective of an Open Source Marketing Company

Seen from the perspective of InitMarketing, it is much easier for us to provide Open Source marketing services to companies.

The risk with communities is that discussions could take long and decisions could be delayed, which means that, potentially, InitMarketing would spend more time than we would get paid for. Additionally, OSS associations or foundations usually ask for a discount, which we are happy to provide, but which adds to the risk of not really being able to cover our costs and time investment.

There are benefits in working with OSS communities, most importantly that we could enjoy open discussions about marketing strategy, planning and implementation, because this allows anyone to see how well we do our job - or not - and we can learn a lot from a miriad of ideas and feedback. Last but not least, InitMarketing could help communities make the jump towards more professional marketing without sacrificing the community and its spirit - a challenge we can’t wait to accept.

Netzwirt has been hosting my Weblog a couple of years until recently for free. For the InitMarketing website, I bought a dedicated server and meanwhile moved my Weblog to that other server.

Many thanks to Reto Gassmann of Netzwirt for the highly reliable hosting during the past years!

While at LinuxTag 2008, I met with Jure Kodzoman of Interchange fame. Interchange is a well established Open Source e-commerce platform, existing for over 12 years, and very popular in the USA.

We sat down to discuss from a marketing perspective the Interchange website and a brochure they created for distribution at their LinuxTag booth.

These are the issues I identified and some changes I proposed to Jure (which would still need some more consideration before being implemented):

1. The current domain name of the website (icdevgroup.org) is extremely hard to remember because it does not relate to the Interchange brand. The domain needs to be in sync with the project name, hence they should move the website to a domain that includes “interchange” in its name. It need not be a .com TLD, .org or .net suffice for a community-driven OSS project.
2. Today’s tagline ” Powering web-based applications since 1995″ does not tell that Interchange is an e-commerce platform nor that it is Open Source. Better taglines would be “The most flexible Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The first Open Source E-commerce Platform” or “The Open Source Platform Powering E-commerce world-wide since 1995″. It’s a great selling point that Interchange exists since 1995 and it might be a valid claim that they are - yet another potential tagline - “The first Open Source Alternative for E-commerce”.
3. The Interchange website lacks a concise welcome blurb on the front page. This makes it very hard to visitors new to Interchange understand what it is about. A sample welcome blurb: “Interchange is powering e-commerce since 1995. Its proven and highly flexible open source platform provides the building blocks to assemble individual online shop solutions. Interchange can be easily configured to grow with your business.”
4. It is better to communicate only one major news on the front page through a banner especially to guide new visitors. For example, don’t advertise LinuxTag in one banner plus a general banner plus a banner about the Interchange 5.6 release in the same space. Instead, highlight the 5.6 release in a banner, provide a link to a landing page and at that landing page, say: “Come to LinuxTag and get a hands-on demo”.

Open Source companies can nicely take advantage of the positive effects of blogging: Markets are conversations. Weblogs are a powerful medium of communication, because they provide first-hand information about Open Source products. In a way, Weblogs even turn core developers into sales people, because with every blog entry they seamlessly sell the product to other developers.

Weblogs are an efficient way of learning how to non-obtrusively sell an Open Source product. The simple fact that a Weblog requires you to

• actually write down what you think
• take into account the interests of your target audience

lets Open Source bloggers start to think in terms of selling and marketing the product. With their Weblog, they go out there and show what the product is capable of doing and why they enjoy using it. Additionally, the way that Weblogs allow for interactive communication (e.g. via commenting functionality) creates a style of communication that is based on very similar principles like the underlying beliefs of successful sales.

Hence, you can use Weblogs to subtly coach employees of an Open Source company in learning how to effectively communicate to a larger audience. Weblogs will also foster the exchange of information within an Open Source company to raise understanding about the product. For example, a new employee might start blogging about the product and asks his colleagues for advice whenever unsure about some technical specifics. The pure fact that he does not want to make himself look like a fool when writing something wrong in his Weblog, will help clarify things for him, maybe also for other colleagues and the public.

Greg is right in claiming that there aren’t any hard and fast rules when it comes to best practices for coprorate blogging: “Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.” Which means that personality counts in blogging and I would add that this is also true for Open Source sales.

Given that Open Source companies can reach maximum distribution with a product freely available for download to anyone, blogging nicely aligns with this freeconomics approach, because it allows Open Source companies to reach their diverse world-wide target audience with information freely readable by anyone and to sell it non-obtrusively as well as cost-efficiently.

My talk entitled Marketing Open Source Software at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany was very well attended and the audience asked some great questions.

Find below the slides. I have added three more graphs related to Open Source business models to the slides deck I had used at previous presentations.

I have also uploaded the German slides of my presentation Marketing von Open-Source-Software at Webinale in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Since founding InitMarketing in February, our customer base is steadily growing. Amongst others, we help the following companies with their Open Source marketing efforts:

• Day is a leading provider of integrated content, portal and digital asset management software.
• Magnolia is a leading commercial open-source Enterprise Content Management System based on the Java Content Repository standard (JSR-170).
• OTRS is a leading provider of IT service management solutions that empower companies to automate their IT and align it to the needs of the business.
• Young Media Concepts integrates ECM, CRM and BPM into a combined powerful and easy-to-use suite named Volano, based on eZ publish Open Source CMS.
• Zimory is the first online marketplace where anyone is able to sell and buy server capacities world-wide on the internet through a web-based interface.

The kind of work we did and do for them includes marketing strategy consulting, coaching for VC pitches, website evaluation and re-launch, writing white papers and case studies, organizing event participation, executing media campaigns and more from the broad range of Open Source marketing services that InitMarketing offers.

Thanks to all our customers for trusting in us! We know that without them, we would not exist and we are wholeheartedly committed to making them successful.

Find more information about our customers at www.initmarketing.com/customers.

I am happy to present again at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany after skipping last year’s event. Come and see and hear me talk about Marketing Open Source Software in room “Berlin 2″ at Saturday, March 31st, 12:00-13:00.

If you would like to meet me in Berlin, I’ll be there Friday afternoon until Saturday afternoon - just drop me a line.

The InitMarketing team welcomes Roberto Galoppini who will join us from today. He is located in beautiful Rome, Italy and a highly valuable addition to our team.

Roberto has taken an active interest in several free/open source software organizations. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the SourceForge Marketplace and acts as the Institutional Relationship Manager for the OpenOffice.org Italian Association. Roberto is also a technical writer for IT and computer-related magazines.

Most notably, I value Roberto’s experience as an Open Source entrepreneur which aligns nicely with the pragmatic marketing approach we pursue at InitMarketing.

Roberto regularly blogs on commercial Open Source software at http://robertogaloppini.net.

I am very much looking forward to working with Roberto!