> Dries opinion on why it's important: "Plus, large organizations that are > about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't > want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses > call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what > technologies to adopt."
Yes, the large businesses look to the analyst firms to tell them what is a "safe" choice. They don't want to go out on a limb and make a choice that goes against the common practice. By going with the recommendations of the analysts, they can always justify their decision and point their boss to the Gartner report saying that IBM (or whatever) was a recommended as a good choice for the type of system they needed to implement. > How they did it: > "One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is > talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about > Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried > out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls > myself." > > Ie, paid marketing people who are lobbying analysts and ringing them > constantly to develop relationships. ideas anyone? Yes, if the Plone Foundation had a paid marketing person, I think this would be a very effective use of their time. Reaching out to the analysts and showing them Plone's strengths. I know that Matt Hamilton will be meeting with Janus Boye (who just organized the http://jboye.com conference in Aarhus, Denmark) at an upcoming conference in England. Scott - you and I may want to jump on Matt's suggestion of having an "analysts day" at Gilbane and invite all the analysts to a session where we can get them up-to-speed on the state of Plone, and try to get Plone included in their future CMS reports, or at least get them blogging about it and getting Plone on the radar screen of larger organizations. Nate -- Nate Aune - [email protected] http://www.jazkarta.com http://card.ly/natea +1 (617) 517-4953 _______________________________________________ Evangelism mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
