Re: [Evangelism] promoting WPD
In Albuquerque, we've never had more than a Plone Users luncheon or happy hour. We took a baby step last year by using WPD to hold a Python/Zope/Plone open house. Our corporate daily newsletter gave us a paragraph to explain that we were discussing content management and web solutions to a variety of problems. Our attendees were most of the local Python community and many from the corporate web group. Only when someone arrived did they then learn that the event was a WPD one. This year we're going to expand our outreach into the broader community, involve other Plone shops, and see how it goes. I like the idea that Plone is quick web communication. I also think we'll emphasize the intersection of web content management, social software collaboration, and enterprise portal capabilities. If you explicitly promote WPD, I think you must be prepared to immediately follow that up by answering the question, What the heck is a Plone and why should I care? We dodged that by calling the event one thing and using WPD as the motivation, rationale, and the international glue. -- Karl Chris Calloway wrote: On 3/11/2009 1:35 PM, Scott Paley wrote: Thinking more about this though, who does WPD target? Are we trying to target those who don't have any idea what a CMS is? -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/promoting-WPD-tp2461384p2466579.html Sent from the Evangelism mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] promoting WPD
Chris, This is probably the most astute comments on Plone I've read. Plone does have a marketing value proposition problems. It should either admit its an ECM/consultantware/framework (which is more or less how we at Pretaweb market it now), or ... well I don't think are many other niches left for it. With marketing as an ECM Plone has lost its opportunity with Alfresco getting traction with it's The open source ECM slogan. Plone is possibly the only openly developed high bus number ECM but that's harder to market. Either way plone doesn't market itself like this so any individual effort isn't very effective. In terms of making plone approachable to developers I've been being trying my best to muddle through ways to get some of this done in the last year. With documentation, I've agitated on teh documentation list and individuals the conference and managed to piss some people off but at the same time with pushing from plenty of others I think the direction is better with a focus on manuals being the only official documentation. The single understandable developer manual is still too daunting however for the doc team to consider and I agree it shouldn't come from the doc team but the developers. Myself and Rok Garbas have been trying to get buyin for a sphnix based way of publishing plone developer documentation, with the idea that if plone documentation in svn is visible then it will get written better (or at all). There are political problems there too. but perhaps your monetarism idea is what is needed. Perhaps developer documentation needs to officially taken away from teh docteam and given to core developers. All I can think of saying is we need more people like you saying these things Also I'm working on a tool called hostout to make hosting more manageable for amateurs. Making plone simple enough for amateurs is the only way to grow the community and survive I think. --- Dylan Jay, Plone Solutions Manager www.pretaweb.com tel:+61299552830 mob:+61421477460 skype:dylan_jay -Original Message- From: evangelism-boun...@lists.plone.org [mailto:evangelism-boun...@lists.plone.org] On Behalf Of Chris Calloway Sent: Thursday, 12 March 2009 12:07 PM To: evangelism@lists.plone.org Subject: Re: [Evangelism] promoting WPD On 3/11/2009 3:00 PM, Calvin Hendryx-Parker wrote: I'd be interested in hearing as many of these stories as possible so we can help others not make the same mistakes. I bet that rarely Plone was the issue, but the people involved in the project just didn't know what power they really had. I could be wrong and would still love to leverage this info if possible. You'd like to hear about it on this list? With open archives? I think you'd be asking for blog-fodder for our competitors. Because they really aren't stories about people not knowing what power they had. And a lot of it was to do with Plone, its community, and its culture. This is why I don't have a blog. :) I'd be glad to give you private run downs. I'm sure I have given you some already. :) I'm sure some are well know to you already because you swim in these waters, Calvin. The biggest horror story is one I'm not supposed to even talk about. It's not like everybody around the Triangle doesn't know it. It's just that it involved a couple million dollars of charitable funds and some highly placed people lost their jobs over it. So all the observers have been asked to have respect for the dead and shut up. By their bosses. And it just gets talked about privately, usually by the bosses with the checkbooks whenever someone brings up Plone because it is some damn succulent gossip. But I can *categorize* some of the main problems on this list, starting with the aforementioned case and some others like it. The number one problem has been great variability in the abilities and ethics of consulting companies operating in the area. Not yours. Yours and a couple of others have been the mop up people called in to clean up some of the previous disasters. Most of the crap companies have been outed and have left the area, leaving behind only their legacy of don't-use-Plone in their wake. But we have at least one problem company still muddying the waters here. As you might see, there would liability in telling enough of the story to identify that company. Anyway, that problem is kind of taking care of itself. The bad companies have been identified and blacklisted. But not without leaving long term problems for Plone marketing in my locality. Plone got started in a big way pretty early here. There were big ass Plone projects underway here even before Plone 1.x was out. It took until sometime in Plone 2.x to get the bad companies banished because it took awhile to really figure out just how bad they were. So this relates to the number two problem. Because you might think, well, bad consulting companies are equal opportunity employers
Re: [Evangelism] promoting WPD
Hey Chris, Thinking more about this though, who does WPD target? Are we trying to target those who don't have any idea what a CMS is? Scott On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Chris Calloway c...@unc.edu wrote: On 3/11/2009 9:49 AM, Roberto Allende wrote: Then... considering what the communication people say, do you think that if we use Content Management Event or Day, instead of Plone could be better in terms of communication ?. People who don't know what Plone is also don't know what content management is. And if you've heard of content management, you've probably heard of Plone. At least, that's my experience. So I don't know that an alternative name change leaving out the Plone brand helps those people who don't know what content management is, or those who do. WPD might need a secondary slogan to communicate what Plone is to those people who don't know what Plone *or* content management is, though. In simplest terms, what a CMS does is help people get their content on the web quickly. The word content, however, is kind of jargon-y for most people. When I use the word content with people who don't know what Content Management is, their eyes just glaze over. And that's most people. Who need content management. And don't know it yet. Additionally, content is a means to and ends. Content is something you want to communicate to people. And that's what a CMS really does. It *communicates* content. On the web. And people understand what the words communicate and web mean without having to understand the context of what content management is. So I would just suggest the title, with a secondary slogan like: World Plone Day: Communicate on the Web or World Plone Day: Quick Web Communications (I like the first one because it manages expectations. I find it really important to manage expectations up front when doing a marketing event.) You could incorporate that into your logo as well. Just put Communicate on the Web below the logo in smaller type. Or encircle the logo with that secondary slogan. I'm not really good with that part. I'm sure somebody can figure that out. It tells people, hey, I'm going to an event that will help me communicate on the web. (Possibly quickly.) And that's really what people want Plone for. And it tells people what Plone is even better than an elevator speech. So, yes, I think explaining that Plone helps you communicate on the web is an good thing to communicate. On the web. :) -- Sincerely, Chris Calloway http://www.secoora.org office: 332 Chapman Hall phone: (919) 599-3530 mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism -- Scott Paley | ABSTRACT EDGE Office: 212.352.9311 Direct: 212.352.1470 Fax: 212.352.9498 Website: http://www.abstractedge.com Blog: http://www.brandinteractivism.com ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
Re: [Evangelism] promoting WPD
On 3/11/2009 1:35 PM, Scott Paley wrote: Thinking more about this though, who does WPD target? Are we trying to target those who don't have any idea what a CMS is? That's a good question, Scott. I was just trying to help Roberto clarify what he wants from suggesting we rename WPD. I will say, that the WPD event my user group held last year only attracted people who already knew what a CMS is, already knew what Plone is, and, well, were already using Plone. I don't think that was a good use of our time. It was fun seeing everybody. But it wasn't a good use of department time during business hours on a work day. Part of that was, Plone is already marketed to death in my area. It's been very visible since the beginning here and we've trained just about everybody who is a candidate for Plone training here. There are commercials for Plone on the local public radio station here, ferpetessake. There was also non-profit here that was making free Plone sites for just about any other local non-profit that wanted one right from the beginning of Plone. So everybody here has had a Plone site at one time or another and they're mostly kind of over it now. There have also been some monumental Plone and Zope project failures and unmet expectations due to Plone over-marketing in my neck of the woods that have given Plone a bad name in many quarters around where I live. It's very hard to market Plone here to anyone who knows what content management is because they have X number of Plone horror stories to draw upon already as their main knowledge of what content management is. So I can't really say what would be good for your area. But in my area, about the only people left to market Plone to are people who don't know what a CMS is yet, but who may need one. And I'm not sure if I'm ready to manage the expectations of people in that category, given past experience. -- Sincerely, Chris Calloway http://www.secoora.org office: 332 Chapman Hall phone: (919) 599-3530 mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 ___ Evangelism mailing list Evangelism@lists.plone.org http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism