Poll: How do you market your FOSS project?
Active marketing team uses word-of-mouth & paid advertising, as well as PR campaigns.
0% (0 votes)
One or two people handle PR. They focus mostly on PR campaigns and word-of-mouth.
13% (1 vote)
No dedicated team or individual, but submit regular or occasional announcements and newsletters.
50% (4 votes)
Rely solely on word-of-mouth - don't have time for sophisticated marketing efforts.
25% (2 votes)
Don't believe in marketing. FOSS shouldn't be marketed at all.
13% (1 vote)
Total votes: 8
Comments
You're Absolutely Right
All of that is marketing! And then there are some additional steps developers can take, such as some of the things the OOo team does:
Some of those aren't real easy if you don't have people helping you, but they are other things a project team can do.
Please Post Discussion About the Poll
Please post comments about the poll here:
http://blue-gnu.biz/content/how_do_you_market_your_foss_project
* why the poll
* why market your project
I'd rather the discussion take place under the article about the poll, and reserve the poll comments for clarifying an answer or sharing what project you're with.
D.C. Parris
Publisher, Blue Gnu
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcparris
https://www.xing.com/profile/Don_Parris
The problem is lack of understanding....
DC, I can appreciate where you're coming from, but very respectfully disagree with your impulse to try and focus just on the poll itself. :-)
What I believe the problem here, that Josiah enunciates and typifies, is one of failing to understand what marketing actually is.
* Having a project website is marketing
* Having documentation for a project, eg man page, is marketing
* Announcing a release via eg Freshmeat, is marketing
* Having an announce email list is marketing
* Having a User discussion email list or forum is marketing
* Simply announcing, via whatever mechanism, a new version/release is marketing
* Something as simple as the frequency of releases is marketing
* Even picking the name of a project is marketing!
The only way you can have an Open Source project without marketing is if you never tell anyone in any way shape or form about it. 'Word of mouth' is marketing too!!! :-)
And if no one ever knows about it, regardless of license, I'd suggest you don't have an Open Source project. :-P
As for me? I have 3 standalone GPL'd projects and a 4th which is a plugin for a Web CMS. The 1st of those projects I do the bare minimum for. The 2nd is generally used in conjunction with the 3rd and hence gets a certain amount of cross promotion that way.
The 3rd is the one I go to town on. I'd never bother with paid adverts, IMHO the ROI ain't worth it. Well I make zero direct dollars from all this, so ROI is tricky under those circumstances. :-)
The project name was subject to a few criteria: Short. Simple. Tips the hat to the project that I forked from (it had been stagnant for years) - which also implies a certain amount of cross over marketing from a long term player! Very Bad Pun - compulsory in this game: eg GNU. :-D and so on.
I know who my target market is and have a "plan" on how to let them know about the project. ie I have goals.
I try very hard to do frequent releases and hence maximise new eyeballs via freshmeat. Write blog articles on how to use the tool better. Be an active participant in the maillist. Be an active participant in that projects *field*. I'm in effect competing against tools that range up into the 1/2 a mil a year bracket! The reality, those tools are way more sophisticated than my target market needs or wants.
Flipside, I get great ideas that I in turn can implement. As well as picking up respect in the field itself. It all helps!
Etc etc etc.
All of this in turn drives additional "out of scope" marketing efforts. Word of mouth for example. Someone does an article about tool X. Couple of users of my project pipe in and say, how about Y instead. This happened two weeks ago. Drove nearly twice as much traffic as a freshmeat announce - one of which was a week before. So perfect example of how effective that can be.
Hmm. This is getting *loooong*. So I'll wrap there. :-)
Cheers!
- Steve
PS the 3rd project ref'd above? 'AWFFull'. Yes it does pronounce as awful. Told you it was a bad pun. ;-)
PPS Congrats on the new site!
Why?
What does an OSS project gain by working on marketing? I understand if there is a business model behind it like Apache or MySQL, but take GNOME. Why should GNOME market itself?
No one profits from more "users" except that with more users come more developers. I'd argue that marketing efforts simply confuse the whole mess. Instead of encouraging people to find software that fits their needs, it encourages people to use the software their hear the most about and miss projects that might fit better. It really unlevels the playing field because some get more attention because they make a bigger fuss about themselves. Marketing growth is artificial growth. It isn't natural and isn't driven by open source principles.
Did I fire anyone up? Discuss. :-)
flux + buzz = biz
FOSS developers need to pay more attention to Web 2.0 and think about that:
flux + buzz = biz
I don't know if this formula is understandable in english; I discovered it last year in reading "La Révolte du Pronétariat : Des mass média aux média des masses." ... (flux means hight trafic, and biz for business...)
Flux + Buzz = Biz