Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Defining a marketing strategy

Hi Charles, *

Here are my few and humble thought...

First of I think we should define our target. Who are we aiming at.
Secondly we should define our preferred available channels.
Third is to define our mission (didn't we actually do that already?)

The target:
We have already convinced the free software environment that we are not 
only the best product, but also has the best "heart and soul". So we 
should move on and find new targets: The "free as in free beer" market. 
Sorry, but on the Windows platform users can't distinguish between open 
source and freeware. We need Windows (and mac) users too.

In stead of spending our time and effort on Apache Open Office and IBM 
(hey -  we have already beaten them) we should emphasize all the 
different efforts for the enterprise market: Easier installation on 
large scale Windows, Certification program, higher stability, huge 
documentation etc. I'm a little bit tired of all the internal 
discussions about Rob Weir and his FUD. Forget about him for a while and 
concentrate on our primary competitor: Microsoft! (please). This is 
where our future users are to be found.

And Rob? We can tackle him. His project can't deliver - we can[1]!

By the way: about a year ago i made an open source evaluation of some of 
the most prominent open source project including The Document 
Foundation. The evaluation was done by the use of a objective 
(mathematical) method but also about 50 interviews. One of the results 
was that we need two things:

 * A clear roadmap. Perhaps we have one, but it must be more clear and
   have a prominent place on our website. A roadmap is one of the first
   things enterprise CIOs are looking for.
 * A more clear decision flow within our own organization.Who is
   actually deciding what? One of the cases has been the new design
   project (the old renaissance project from OO.o). A lot of mock-ups
   and sketches has been seen but nobody has picked it up and made a
   corporate decision. But the problem is that users can't find out who
   that in fact should be.

The channels:
Where are all the local marketeers? I see some around but not many. I 
for my self is running my own game here in my sweet little country but I 
can't see there is a coordinated effort. Okay we share information but 
not enough. Italo has done a great job on the international (English 
speaking areas), but what suits everybody doesn't really suit anybody.

The mission:
What story do we want to tell? Is our goal to convince that our product 
is the best? the cheapest? Are we trying to convince users to download 
and use LibreOffice or to become engaged and participating?

Michael Meeks has had a few nice posts about large organizations using 
LibreOffice (and open source software in general) and not giving 
anything back. I believe that this is one of the stories we want to 
tell. The question is how.

Another story I personally would like to hear is about "mother tongue". 
I'm native speaker of a very small language and in *my* marketplace this 
is a big issue. I don't fear Apache Open Office in Denmark because 
Apache don't have a localization project for Danish. Lately I have been 
involved in setting up the Kalaallisut (Greenlandish) localization 
process and you can believe that the issue is important in a country 
with only 56.749 citizens. LibreOffice might be the FIRST computer 
program in Kalaallisut ever published.

Finally:
Lets look back and enjoy the first two years here in the summer 
vacation. But when we get back we should look ahead. I'm sure we have 
made a lot of mistakes during these two years but not much we should 
regret. I'm proud to be a part of The Document Foundation ;-)

[1]: 
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/case/mimo-working-group-french-ministries-certify-libreoffice-release-0

Cheers,
Leif Lodahl

On 05-07-2012 16:37, Charles-H.Schulz wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> This might be a long thread and I wish we will all stay on topic, as it
> is an important subject.
>
> The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project will soon be two
> years old. Well, not TDF the entity of course, but the LibreOffice
> project. Needless to say, from my perspective at least, it's been two
> years that have changed me, taught me a lot and brought a lot of
> happiness and good moment. We have arrived in many ways at the end of a
> chapter of our story, and by that I don't mean that it's time to go to
> bed and sleep :-).
>
> The Foundation, as an entity, is properly established, although certain
> processes have yet to be fully set. Some pieces are somewhat lacking,
> but otherwise it's running well. The project is doing well, we have an
> ever increasing flow of volunteers and developers.
>
> What is missing, at this stage, is some blocks that  are needed to take
> the project to the next step. We have achieved an important thing in
> less than two years: we have proved that a community-led project can be
> strong, sustainable, and is able to turn around situations that were
> previously deemed to difficult to change. We have stopped being seen as
> the young and foolish dreamers that refuse the reality. We are now seen
> as mature, and we have given the world the best free and open source
> software office suite. We can be proud of that. But it's time to move on
> to something bigger.
>
> We have seen that the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice has
> generated quite a lot of "creative destruction". We kept much content
> from the former Openoffice.org infrastructure, and most of the community
> moved happily to LibreOffice. But in several places, processes that got
> disrupted never quite came back to what they were. And in others, broken
> things or unreached goals have not been reached (yet). Today, on this
> list, I would like to focus on something that took a long time to
> achieve in OpenOffice.org, if it ever was achieved. I'm talking about
> the need to define a marketing strategy. Mind you, we have marketing
> material on the wiki. We have presentation slides, we have visual and
> graphical elements, we have the calendar (thanks Marc!) , the web
> clippings, etc. But that does not make a marketing strategy. What we
> need is higher level goals most of us agree with, and we need a way to
> structure the marketing team, who should not just be marketing contacts
> for this or that region/country, but actual volunteers actively working
> on marketing. Also, we need a way to ackowledge their contribution, or
> rather we need to make their contribution rewarding and pleasant. But
> that's another part of the discussion.
>
> As I said, we need a marketing strategy. Right now everytime LibreOffice
> gets released we have release notes. These notes are interesting pages
> to be sure, but we need to think and decide how we position ourselves;
> how we communicate our brand in order to raise its awareness, whether we
> push forward a product or a community (or both). We need some higher
> level churn up.
>
> As for myself -but that's me- I am very interested in how we position
> the brand positioning. I'm not so interested -marketing wise- in product
> strategy, first of all because such a thing does not work in an open
> source project (since you can't really tell a volunteer what to do
> unless you find one that will work things out with you) and second
> because LibreOffice is a complete and full featured office suite
> catering to pretty much any existing and potential market out there. But
> again, it's time to define this strategy and help grow the adoption of
> LibreOffice.
>
> Apologies for the long message,



--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted