[Typo3-marketing] Another marketing paper

[Michelle Heizer]

Thank you for the article. Very nicely written!


The problem I have with some of the ideas tends to stem from my experiences
in the US as both a marketing person and a consultant.

We have to face the fact that TYPO3 is a Euro-centric CMS and will always be
that way. Having a different portal or a different arm of the association
won't change that. You take one look in the extension repository, the
websites, or even the software itself and you will see datestamps in
dd/mm/yyyy (and when you have a lot of extensions, it's a lot of work for
US-based consultancies to overcome), text in other languages, or even text
with broken English. There are hundreds (thousands?) of CMSes whose
companies are based in the US. TYPO3 will always have a problem competing
with that because the US is a fickle bunch of people. They tend to want to
buy products based solely in the US. You've probably seen the "Made in the
USA" stickers before. While I don't agree with this, unfortunately I'm in
the minority. Can this perception be changed? Honestly, I'm not sure it can.
But later on in this email, I'll explain why that might not really matter.

I believe there should be two types of marketing for TYPO3: One for
enterprises, developers and consultancies, the other for small to mid-size
businesses (SMBs).

How does one find TYPO3? Right now, a business, developer or consultancy
would have to know they need a content management system, they would have to
know what a content management system is and what it does, they would have
to research the different types of CMSes, then they would come to typo3.com
by finding the link via a search engine, a site like CMS Matrix, a press
release, etc. For the majority of SMBs, this will never happen. SMBs don't
even know what a CMS is, let alone understand why they need one. They do not
have the time to research CMSes and they would probably get confused in
doing so. Most SMBs don't have an IT department and if they do, it's very
small.

So how should we market to SMBs? I really believe SMBs are an untapped
market. There are millions of SMBs in the US and each one could benefit from
TYPO3. I have read many articles about what SMBs are looking for. They want
low start-up costs, in favor of a monthly or annual fee. During the last two
years, large companies have been focusing in on them. If you look at the CRM
market, for example, most are turning to hosted applications. Even Microsoft
just lowered the price of its CRM and opened it up to the hosting market.
Hosted applications are very attractive to businesses will little to no IT
departments.

So with this theory in mind. Let's say you have a town with 500 local
businesses. If you pulled each of them into TYPO3 and charged a monthly
hosting fee of $100 (or whatever), you can quickly see how much this would
be worth it to a consultancy. My company has been moving in this direction
and it's been very successful. Remember, TYPO3 is a wonderful application
for hosting several domains in one installation and the extensions provide
the modularity and features SMBs are looking for. SMBs may not be able to
afford a large extension up front, but they like that TYPO3 has the
capability of handling future additions as funds become available to them.

So how can consultancies attract these type of clients? Currently, TYPO3
consultancies find projects by being listed on TYPO3.com. They wait until
someone looking for TYPO3 goes to the list, picks them, goes to their
website, contacts them, and then they bid on a project. A customer sends out
the same email to several consultancies and just chooses the lowest bidder.
This is a bad practice to get into. I completely understand what Sander
meant about "fixing" the work of other consultancies. We've had to do this a
lot lately. We've even had customers who wanted us to fix the work of other
T3 developers except they didn't have a lot of money left or time because
they had already given both to the previous developer. We need to move away
from this because it's not benefiting anyone, not to mention this is doing
nothing to spread TYPO3! Consultancies need to be more proactive. They need
to start going to local businesses and explain to them in layman's terms why
they need a CMS and how their company could benefit from it. Most businesses
just use off-the-shelf products like Frontpage or Dreamweaver or have some
local web design company create a site for them that never gets updated.
They don't understand the benefits of a CMS, database or an extension. They
don't even know what they want in a website or what kind of technology is
available to them. This is the perception we need to change.

Most SMBs will never want to attend a conference, buy a t-shirt, join a tug,
attend a snowboard tour, etc. They just want a product that works. They
won't fall in love with the T3 name, they will fall in love with the
software itself and how it will quickly benefit their business. I've been
working with small businesses the last few months and they had no idea that
you could even edit a website through a browser. Once we explain to them in
ordinary, non-technical language how easy it will be to update a site
without having to purchase additional software, plus all the special
features their site can have, they get excited and sign up. We've been
training people with little to no computer experience. The results have been
pretty interesting.

This leads us to the group that needs the "TYPO3 marketing" the most.
Consultancies! They need to be the ones to support the T3 name, through
marketing efforts and donations. The only way to get TYPO3 to grow in the US
is to get more consultancies using it. SMBs will only want to work with an
actual person or company. They like the interaction, the training, the
support a consultancy has to offer. If we had thousands of US consultancies
(as opposed to the two on typo3.com) moving all the businesses around them
into TYPO3, the use of TYPO3 would grow exponentially and would filter into
larger enterprises.

This is also where I agree with Sander. In the end, the people responsible
for "selling" TYPO3 will be the consultancies. I think that TYPO3 training
and certification will certainly help, but we also need to enable
consultancies in their marketing efforts. TYPO3.com should be a repository
for white papers, case studies, marketing materials, feature lists,
presentations, videos, etc. Anything consultancies need to show to potential
customers. This will ensure there is no misinformation coming from
consultancies because we are controlling the information flow. I don't
necessarily think SMBs even need to know the name "TYPO3", they just need to
understand that they need it. :)

Ok, so why do I have reservations about breaking out the association into
continental/regional and national/local groups?

1. It's  not supportable. Since this is an open source project and we are
all volunteers, our personal and work lives come first. Projects tend to
take awhile to get completed or don't ever get completed. When things don't
get completed, they fall back on the TYPO3 core group who are already
overworked. If we extend ourselves more than we can handle, it will look
very unprofessional, not too mention the core group may resent having to
take over all these extra groups.

2. Politically, the continental group probably won't work in the US right
now and so we'd need to determine the ROI. I have to be honest. After the
last presidential election, a large group of people moved north to Canada
and south to Mexico, leaving behind many Americans that don't want to deal
with these countries. From within the US, "America" means the United States:
Canada is Canada, and Mexico is Mexico, and a Canadian or Mexican-based
company is not "American". For example, I was at a Chamber of Commerce
luncheon this week where two American soldiers were invited to speak.
Politics have become really strange here, they transcend everything -- even
business -- and everyone is worried about looking un-patriotic. Once again,
I don't agree with this -- just relaying what I see.

3. Vendors may help these groups in order to generate business for their
consultancies. I have seen a TYPO3 site for the US that was nothing more
than a forum and a banner ad at the top for the consultancy. What message
does this send to people? While they may have started it with good
intentions, my opinion is that it may do more harm than good. We'd have to
be very careful who we allowed to represent the name of TYPO3 to the general
public.

4. We would be thinning out our community. It seems that the people who do
find and stay with TYPO3 like it because of the strong sense of community.
If we thin out the group, we'd be losing this aspect of TYPO3. Instead, we
may just need to funnel out the community more, getting the community more
involved rather than less. Possibly with groups for US specific issues.

5. Miscommunication and misinformation!! If we let the countries market for
themselves, we risk even more misinformation about TYPO3. Keeping the
information central while making it easy for consultancies to use in their
countries will allow us to keep the information more controlled.


I haven't mentioned enterprises yet, because I'm not sure how we can
effectively market to them in the US. Enterprises are a unique breed. They
have their own IT departments with developers and their own inner politics.
Most already have contracts with Dell, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc.
They are skeptical of open source products, especially ones that aren't
located in the US. They feel they won't get adequate support and if the
project fails, their jobs are on the line. Most of the time, they just
extend the contracts they already have with these companies to include a CMS
or get recommendations for a CMS. They do attend conferences, but usually
only large IT related conferences. It would be difficult for them  to
justify travel expenses for a T3 conference. They aren't going to show up to
work in a TYPO3 t-shirt, but they may take the information back to their
company if we exhibit at one of those larger conferences. The problem is
that these conferences are far from cheap and we'd be competing with big
companies who themselves are sponsoring the conferences. On the plus side,
many enterprises are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their CMS
choices. The market is starting to open up again, but open source is still
not taken very seriously. So we'd have to change the perception of open
source, which is not an easy feat.

So to recap: I'd prefer seeing typo3.com be a resource for enterprises and
consultancies. Get them interested in the product and explain why they need
it, and how it will help their organization and clients with
industry-specific solutions (very key point here).

Get consultancies in the association and let them know the benefits of being
in the association. Maybe we could give them exclusive use of a marketing
repository. Since many people here are marketing professionals, we could
also add articles to the repository on how to market TYPO3 to SMBs or even
enterprises.

typo3.org would stay the resource for developers/consultancies. I see no
problem with that. 

TUGs, conferences, merchandise, etc. would be marketed to developers and
consultancies. Each country would have one contact/organizer that reports
directly to the association. The contact would be responsible for getting
people to help them and for determining the ROI for each of these items in
their respective country. For example, maybe there is not enough interest in
a TYPO3 conference in the US right now, but having TYPO3 reps attend 5
IT-related conferences would be much more effective. The specifics of
marketing to prospective T3 users will be different in each country, but the
information needed will be the same. By giving local consultants the tools
they need to sell T3 to clients to meet their specific needs rather than
trying to establish TYPO3 as a "brand name", we can help the consultants be
successful even when the client has never heard the name. In this manner,
TYPO3 will naturally develop its "brand name" the same way other OpenSource
programs have, such as Linux and Apache. At the same time, by keeping the
association more central, the efforts of those who are organizing and
maintaining the information won't be duplicated by each
continent/region/country/consultancy every time the information is
distributed. The contact/organizer for a country would be able to simply use
the information that pertains to their market.

Let me know what your thoughts are on this, or if you have any questions or
concerns about marketing to the US market.

Cheers!
Michelle Pfeiffer <-- just for Daniel ;)