Re: [PHP] Viral Marketing PHP (was Re: [PHP] Computer Science and PHP)
Hello Manuel, I have just re-read this, and am conscious that I am appearing to disagree with you, too frequently, yet in overview I am wanting to agree!? I am a consultant, and I am well used to playing devil's advocate, ie disagreeing with what is being said, in order to arrive at the best possible solution. Please don't interpret anything said as grounds for a personal argument. Dl Neil wrote: One good point about what you said is that one budgetless what to promote PHP is to use 'viral marketing'. Viral marketing is a way to market something by using a technique that spreads by itself, ie, no additional effort or money needed to be spent by the originator to have the notice of what you want to market spread like crazy. ... sort what ideas can become viral. With that topic in the mind, if you ever figure a viral idea to promote PHP, just share it here to prove the concept as well! :-) I had intended that the 'institutional approach' be seen as the seeds of a viral marketing campaign. If students learn the tool, when they 'go out to work' they want to use it. Even if the student is a 'hobbyist' then it still spreads the 'word' around... That is not viral enough because it is not smooth. When it is not smooth, not only it will propagate slowly but also it may stop propagating at all because word of mouth is not always convincing. To make it work smoothly it should not be hard to convince anybody that PHP is a good idea. =I take it smooth means quick? Yes I agree propagation through 3- and 4-year training institutions will be slow. However PHP can be quickly taught to anyone beyond a 'first steps in programming' course (hopefully after they have graduated from an HTML course too. Thus a 'build on' or 'conversion' PHP course need not take long to run, even as a night course (once/week, 2-3 hours/session). =Years ago I can remember talking to one of the staff who was instrumental in getting ORACLE to market (seriously) ORACLE Applications (accounting system). He told me that he considered that it would take five years to get the product into IT Managers' (decision-makers) minds when they thought of buying an accounting package. He figured that after those five, it would run for a further five years as the pre-eminent solution, ie the first one anyone thought of; and then for the next five years it would start to 'decline' as competitors tried to 'take over'. He was arguing for methods of lengthening the middle five year period, or how essentially the same product could be re-branded, so that it began a new 5/15 year cycle without the company having to invest in a completely new product from scratch. [evidently he also didn't see SAP arriving!] Your point earlier, if statistics say x million dynamic web sites are held together by PHP, IT managers/decision makers tend to feel they should take notice, eg Apache and the Netcraft surveys. The same will apply to PHP, numbers need to build to some 'critical mass' for corporate credibility to follow (as wrong as that sounds). Yes, but you only establish credibility when you manage to put your arguments in favour of PHP in the mouths of opinion makers. Statistics of PHP usage in the PHP site will never be credible enough. It is like when parents tell everybody how smart their kids are, see what I mean? =not the mouths, but the ears of decision makers; and no I establish credibility (in myself) first and then ask them to listen to my words. I liked the parents talking about kids analogy. However I disagree with the analysis/application to this discussion. Which web site contains the most talking-up of M$ products? Which of ORACLE? Which of IBM? etc. Why, there own of course! =a lot of the talk on open source sites does not communicate with IT decision makers. It is talk by techies to techies and of techies; and thus it (almost) never will. That point is most important. It is no good saying that IT Managers are all brainless in (important) technical matters and should be first up against the wall; at least not if you're attempting to convince them of something! There needs to be communication at the IT Manager 'level' (I return to my earlier references to SuSE's marketing approach). =Now is a very good time to be doing this. There is a lot of bad press about M$, eg what's in XP that can really be called an 'upgrade', what of the privacy/M$ 'control', major changes in bulk license pricing arrangements, and some heavy-hitters (eg Gartners) who are raising the issue of M$ products with frequent needs for patching and thereby a steeply increasing TCO (M$'s preferred term = Total Cost of Ownership). Talking in terms of lines of debugged code per day, platform flexibility/neutrality, scaleability, maintainability, ease of use, security, etc, is all far more entertaining (to an IT Manager looking to purchase/standardise on a tool) than the daily interchanges of this discussion list!
Re: [PHP] Viral Marketing PHP (was Re: [PHP] Computer Science and PHP)
Hello, Dl Neil wrote: One good point about what you said is that one budgetless what to promote PHP is to use 'viral marketing'. Viral marketing is a way to market something by using a technique that spreads by itself, ie, no additional effort or money needed to be spent by the originator to have the notice of what you want to market spread like crazy. ... sort what ideas can become viral. With that topic in the mind, if you ever figure a viral idea to promote PHP, just share it here to prove the concept as well! :-) I had intended that the 'institutional approach' be seen as the seeds of a viral marketing campaign. If students learn the tool, when they 'go out to work' they want to use it. Even if the student is a 'hobbyist' then it still spreads the 'word' around... That is not viral enough because it is not smooth. When it is not smooth, not only it will propagate slowly but also it may stop propagating at all because word of mouth is not always convincing. To make it work smoothly it should not be hard to convince anybody that PHP is a good idea. Your point earlier, if statistics say x million dynamic web sites are held together by PHP, IT managers/decision makers tend to feel they should take notice, eg Apache and the Netcraft surveys. The same will apply to PHP, numbers need to build to some 'critical mass' for corporate credibility to follow (as wrong as that sounds). Yes, but you only establish credibility when you manage to put your arguments in favour of PHP in the mouths of opinion makers. Statistics of PHP usage in the PHP site will never be credible enough. It is like when parents tell everybody how smart their kids are, see what I mean? How to get PHP into the institutions? You'd think it would be easy, wouldn't you - it's 'free', and that sounds Being 'free' may be good for budgetless individuals but is the wrong argument for institutions and companies in particular. You need to pick up other argument. great! However you need competent/trained teachers/training staff. You need teaching materials and supporting text books. You need sample exercises and databases. Look at what SuSE are doing with email servers (etc) and RedHat with Linux distributions. Perhaps a distribution of LAMPS or the 'PHP Triad', especially configured for an educational environment could be considered? Finally you need people to be convinced that there's a demand for the teaching, and conversely students convinced that it is a valuable skill to acquire... That is the core of the problem. You can only demonstrate there is demand for teaching if you spread that there is demand for qualified professionals. The PHP situation could be improved if there was an officially certificated training, like some Linux distributions have and even MySQL. The effect of spreading about official certification is that it passes a good impression to those that are not aware that Linux and MySQL is something being taken seriously to the point of having official certifications like for certified Microsoft and Sun Java trainings. Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [PHP] Viral Marketing PHP (was Re: [PHP] Computer Science and PHP)
Hello Manuel, One other dimension, the institutions can only offer classes in the languages (and techniques/technologies) that the trainers know and than they have the resources (hardware, compilers/interpreters) to cover. Maybe therein lies an answer to the 'marketing' side too. The best way to 'market' a new language, ie to cause it to spread virulently (?virus-like) is by offering classes in the schools! Certainly when my customers ask about 'which tool' my first question is always, what skill sets do the staff have?. One good point about what you said is that one budgetless what to promote PHP is to use 'viral marketing'. Viral marketing is a way to market something by using a technique that spreads by itself, ie, no additional effort or money needed to be spent by the originator to have the notice of what you want to market spread like crazy. ... sort what ideas can become viral. With that topic in the mind, if you ever figure a viral idea to promote PHP, just share it here to prove the concept as well! :-) I had intended that the 'institutional approach' be seen as the seeds of a viral marketing campaign. If students learn the tool, when they 'go out to work' they want to use it. Even if the student is a 'hobbyist' then it still spreads the 'word' around... Your point earlier, if statistics say x million dynamic web sites are held together by PHP, IT managers/decision makers tend to feel they should take notice, eg Apache and the Netcraft surveys. The same will apply to PHP, numbers need to build to some 'critical mass' for corporate credibility to follow (as wrong as that sounds). How to get PHP into the institutions? You'd think it would be easy, wouldn't you - it's 'free', and that sounds great! However you need competent/trained teachers/training staff. You need teaching materials and supporting text books. You need sample exercises and databases. Look at what SuSE are doing with email servers (etc) and RedHat with Linux distributions. Perhaps a distribution of LAMPS or the 'PHP Triad', especially configured for an educational environment could be considered? Finally you need people to be convinced that there's a demand for the teaching, and conversely students convinced that it is a valuable skill to acquire... Regards, =dn -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PHP] Viral Marketing PHP (was Re: [PHP] Computer Science and PHP)
Hello, Dl Neil wrote: One other dimension, the institutions can only offer classes in the languages (and techniques/technologies) that the trainers know and than they have the resources (hardware, compilers/interpreters) to cover. Maybe therein lies an answer to the 'marketing' side too. The best way to 'market' a new language, ie to cause it to spread virulently (?virus-like) is by offering classes in the schools! Certainly when my customers ask about 'which tool' my first question is always, what skill sets do the staff have?. One good point about what you said is that one budgetless what to promote PHP is to use 'viral marketing'. Viral marketing is a way to market something by using a technique that spreads by itself, ie, no additional effort or money needed to be spent by the originator to have the notice of what you want to market spread like crazy. There are some bad examples of viral marketing, like chain letters or selling address lists for unsolicited lists, but viral marketing can be used to market a good thing. For instance, Hotmail did not use marketing in the traditional media. They just added a footer in their users messages to notice that they were sent using Hotmail. The rest is history. Hotmail grown like crazy so much that even Microsoft bought it instead of developing a competitor service. Anybody can think of viral ideas to market PHP. You just need to focus your brainstorm on what is really viral to make sure that with a little effort and no budget you can make a serious impact promoting PHP. There are certain caracteristics that distinguish what may become and what will not become viral. Instead of detail that here I recommend Seth Godin (former Yahoo marketing director) book Unleashing the idea virus. Seth made the book available in full for free here to demonstrate the concept. Palm Pilot and PDF versions are available: http://www.ideavirus.com/01-getit.html The book does not tell you how to create viral ideas, but rather how to sort what ideas can become viral. With that topic in the mind, if you ever figure a viral idea to promote PHP, just share it here to prove the concept as well! :-) Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
