[Typo3-marketing] Another marketing paper

[Michelle Heizer]

Hi Daniel,

> I am meeting a marketing pro from LA in the first week of may and I hope he
> will come up with some useful suggestions.

That's great! Let me know how that goes.

> Generally, I think there are three next steps:
> 
> - finding agencies that are interested in promoting TYPO3 on the east and
> west coast, plus probably somewhere around Chicago, Detroit etc.

I *think* I have this covered. I have a few consultancies interested in
helping out. If there are any others, please contact me off-list.

> - identifying the five most important trade shows and researching price and
> discounts/special programmes for open source projects. Thos could include
> conferences like those on MySQL, BSD, where a booth is rather cheap and all
> the nerds can be reached.

Ok, that is now my next task. I want to target the larger IT-related
conferences. Even if we can't be vendors, we can at least speak at them
which drops the price significantly.

> - producing and placing two or three case studies in key media, on and
> offline. May be CMPro is one of them.

I haven't placed case studies yet, just the press releases. I do agree that
case studies make much better press items. :) Unfortunately, I still have
yet to see a strong US TYPO3 project -- one that uses several extensions and
replaces a complete site. Right now I'm working on a project that's going to
make a great case study. It's only a small non-profit, but I'm donating most
of my services in exchange for complete control of the project, something I
can't get if they were our paying customers. We are creating custom
extensions, using several existing extensions, implementing RSS feeds, an
accessible XHTML design, etc -- the works. I wanted a project that showcases
everything TYPO3 can do. We are even ripping out their M$ email in favor of
open source alternatives. When they add an event in Thunderbird, it updates
their T3 site automatically, which shows how well open source apps work
together since they tend to embrace standards. Their intranet is getting
replaced with T3 and they are going completely paperless. In other words, we
will have a case study that will not only appeal to the CMS community, but
the open source community as well and that way, we will have more
conferences available to us to speak at and more places to submit articles.
This will be a complete open source solution for the non-profit sector. My
husband has published articles in the Linux Journal before, so we probably
won't have a problem getting published there. I'm going to target media that
is not necessarily CMS related.

> So far for a quick shot. I have to go now, but will be happy to return to
> this discussion. I would of course also be available to attend and hold
> presentations if needed.

We may need to take you up on that offer. :)

Michelle