[TYPO3-UG US] US Marketing Plan

[Michelle Heizer]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 10:48 -0700, Gregory Remington wrote:

> 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 ;)

I would love to see it. I was thinking about this recently after reading
an article about Ubuntu Linux
( http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5886194.html ). Many people are
talking about how fast it spread in such a short amount of time and how
their community was a big part of it. Considering how the Linux
distribution market is oversaturated, this is no small feat. They offer
commercial support directly on their website, along with  links to other
providers. They also have a partnership program with 3 membership
levels. It looks like this has been working well for them. I'm wondering
how we would be able to apply this to a TYPO3 US organization.


> 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/
> 

Agreed! I think the first ones will be education, government, churches,
nonprofits, etc. (notice a theme here ;) ). Typically, these are the
first types of organizations to make an investment in open source
because they do it out of a financial need. They also make the best case
studies and help to give the software more credibility.

Michelle