Video: Open Source Innovative yet Ugly, can “Open Marketing” be the solution? (2:00 minutes)
Open Source products are often high on innovation but low on user experience and are often not presented well to the market. They come across as geeky, not user friendly, and sometimes, just ugly.
As these passionate engineers build these fantastic new products, they can be beat out by a large established company with sophisticated marketing and designers (although potentially inferior products). Take for example that I’ve been pretty vocal with the fact I believe Open ID needs a marketing strategy (note they’ve improved with some videos and adoption is picking up)
I know that pisses off a lot of engineers (many who look down their noses on marketing) but apparently companies like Sony had better MP3 players yet Apple’s superior marketing won the cause. How many of your friends have iPods? How many have Sony’s MP3 player?
So how could this be fixed? I was in Barcelona with some of the top bloggers in the area at our blogger dinner over Tapas and beers and we got onto the discussion on how there are some great open source products out there they really need business and marketing strategy in order to be successful.
How could this work? Open Marketing could be a virtual team of marketing professionals that could be centralized, and help create specialized marketing campaigns for products, and of course sharing in on whatever revenues or recognition that are generated.
Listen in, as Sergio Gaga, Tomy Pelluz, Christian Van der Henst, and Alex Maneu share their opinions.
If you know of any groups that are already doing this, or you would want to get involved and participate, please leave a comment.
11 Comments so far
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Great idea Jeremiah. I can say first hand that turning a techie into a business man has a steep and painful learning curve. For the uber-techies that produce these open-source products the curve may be too great to go it alone.
Ey Jeremiah! Acually, We are trying to manage something around that here in Barcelona, kind of “open marketing” mixed with barcamp…
I hope to have more news after holidays!
This sounds like a great idea.
The first step for open marketers can be to attract designers to open source projects so they win in both ways.
[…] noticia original innovative open source yet ugly. Todo un honor estar linkado desde su blog, y aparecer en ese video, así como haber participado en […]
I believe the almost cult like anti-corporate, anti-capitalism segment of the open source crowd will be rebellious against any marketing push. I also believe that open source such as it is, is massively powerful despite the fact that only on really rare occasions do humans build great software…most of it is incredibly poor quality and open source is no exception. Here’s potentially another case of marketing needs, schedules and demands bumping up against non-business uber-techies with much different priorities…
There was a reason open source was started…to rise up against the machine. I like the overall spirit of the idea but…
“Open Marketing” translated: Geeks endlessly talking to themselves and the cult, about their current pet projects, full of good cheer and drink.
Pet projects, that are, soon to become open source abandonware, when their fleeting attention spans tide down.
Wow, the amount of bullshit on this post could actually sink a ship.
This is what happens when non-technologists start writing about technology. Being a gadget fanbay in no way qualifies you to be able to write or think compentently about this.
Products succeed because there is a need and demand for it. If a technologically superior product fails because of bad marketing, guess what? You still fail because you failed to execute.
EOM.
There’s a pretty wide gulf between what the video suggests is needed (’more user friendliness’, ‘better design’, ’software that’s not hard to use’) and what anything resembling “open source marketing” would provide.
Open source software products are defined as those which are “available with its source code and under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design”. [ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software_development ] This would imply that an open source marketing movement would be one in which the timing of messages, methods for disseminating messages, and the messages themselves would be malleable - that is, anyone participating would be free to enter into discourse on behalf of a property as they see fit… which already happens today. Whether its via blogs, YouTube, casual conversation in the gym, etc. people are already engaging in ‘open source marketing’.
The only thing of real value from an open source marketing movement would be to realize that this is already happening, make assets available to those passionate about getting the word out (press kits for the 21st century: embeddable demos, logos, etc - any content that can be remixed, mashuped, as the “marketers” see fit).
But please, please, please understand: no amount marketing-guru posturing is going to correct fundamental design issues, which is what this group seems to think is the most pressing problem they’re about to solve.
[…] y su crítica al video donde hablábamos del Open Source Marketing. Sergio también lo comparte y sin duda que hace falta sentarse a hablar más del tema para ver si […]
I think this is a great idea. The only effective open source marketing that I have seen is the Firefox efforts.
If there was a group of marketers devoted to getting every open source program more exposure, I think more of them would succeed and be better developed for the mainstream.
Check out OSMPA, the Open Source Marketing Professionals Association: http://www.osmpa.org/
I recently founded InitMarketing, providing Open Source marketing consulting and services: http://www.initmarketing.com - sorry for the shameless plug.
Sandro