[TYPO3-UG US] US Marketing Plan

[Gregory Remington]

Michelle Heizer wrote:


> I think you are right about that. I hope the survey will help to bring
> more people out and maybe we can find ways to help them. I could almost
> envision us building a "who's who" directory of users so that we can
> begin pairing people together and building the alliances you mention.

Hard to say how it will turn out. The important thing is getting a 
larger community involved. One that leans towards the business end 
user/developer. That usually requires an "incentive". For instance, free 
templates, support and easy documentation.

Naturally this needs to be balanced with paid commercial services or you 
have no economic sustainability for development. Imagine the potential 
growth of a development community within a sustainable open source 
economic model ;)


> That would be great. If you need any help with that, let me know. Also,
> I think if we could post a link to the survey on your forum, it would be
> a big help. I will be posting the results to the survey so it might be a
> good resource for your research as well.

For sure. Once I catch up with posts I'll take a peek at Direct Mail 
again. I'm also tied up with Google atm. Mediatech.net rank dropped 
after installing a couple extensions so I'm tweaking an SEO strategy. 
Just added description meta tags to see if that helps. For a while 
Google seems to reward you for not using them.

> I really like the idea of pushing more sponsorship for extension
> development. I think it could work parallel with the solutions section,
> like you mention earlier, because we would be weeding down the extension
> list and getting an idea of what needed to be done. 

Yes, "weeding" is a good description :)

At the same time we need to spend a lot of time evaluating extensions. 
To date there is no extensions usability guide that I'm aware of so we 
should start with the most important ones used in business (tt_shop), 
marketing (RealURL) and corporate infrustructure (LDAP).

> extensions could benefit from further sponsorship and I know the
> developers would certainly appreciate it. Not to mention, from a US
> standpoint, some extensions might need modifications to make it more US
> friendly for our market.

Generating an economy for extension development is going to require some 
type of business and marketing model(s) and a great well structured 
plan. A partner/alliance program is one way. Develop a marketing 
presence out  complimentary projects/markets is what I'm trying to 
achieve. Selling hosting, templates and extension customization is 
another way.

We could start with what we have here. Churches and non profits. What 
other specific industries does TYPO3 do well in? Who is our user base 
here? How could we sell TYPO3 to the realestate market for example. Are 
there any good real estate sites to demo?

Anyone have time to evaluate 3800 web sites? Like extension evaluation 
we are going to need this done over time for our own benefit.

Let's get started :)
http://typo3.org/about/sites-made-with-typo3/

Best,
Greg