Our Annual Pilmigrage to SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo) for Community Building and Open Source Software Development

February 23rd, 2010

As always, we were not disappointed. This was our fourth year at SCALE and we are beginning to grow in perspective and focus on what we want to achieve at this conference.

This year we were focused on three topical areas to gather information, share our thoughts, and have some good conversations. They were:

  • Community Building
  • Open Source Software Trends
  • Green and Sustainability

Community Building:

Community Building was central to two key presentations we went to see:

Karsten Wade from Redhat the Saturday Keynote. He spoke on Being a Catalyst in Communities. The key take aways for us were:

Barn Raising versus Tom Sawyer. The Tom Sawyer analogy is you getting other people (the community) to do your work. As opposed to Barn Raising where the community comes together to accomplish a goal and build on the foundation that you have laid.

Inviting Different Levels of Participation. The person who comes to the community and only sits in the back and says nothing is also a valuable member of the community.

Here are links to a video of Karten’s presentation: Part 1 and Part 2.

Here is a link to the manual and wiki that Karsten helped to create on Creating and Nurturing Communities of Contributors.

Jono Bacon from Ubuntu/Canonical who spoke Saturday morning on the Engine of Revolution (great title, no relation to the talk). We have heard Jono many times and he is always entertaining, thoughtful, and can give one many thoughts to pursue. This coupled with the fact we are currently reading his latest book The Art of Community which is excellent. It is available on line under the Creative Commons License. His take aways this time were:

The Opportunistic Contributor. A community member who only contributes things that they think are cool or something they need. They are not necessarily focused on what the community’s goals are, but you should not dismiss their contributions and ideas.

The importance of Processes. The processes should be simple and easy and should enable the community to participate. We call this getting rid of the 800 lb. gorilla. He demonstrated some of the new features in the Ubuntu desktop that link with Launchpad to make creating and contributing to projects much easier.

Open Source Software Trends

Open Source Software trends were dominated for us around the decision to move our projects to Launchpad. The sub-conference UbuCon (1 day Ubuntu Conference at SCALE) often had one on one conversations about moving to Launchpad. Our take way was that we have to move our 9 Free Open Source projects to Launchpad because this should enable community participation. But, we don’t feel like we are quite ready for the full course at the moment, so we are debating about the commercial project to begin with…and then move one Free Open Source project over to Launchpad, and then eventually all of them. We do have limited resource and experience so we don’t want to get swamped or make fools of ourselves by not providing enough foundation to get a community started.

We also spoke with the folks at the Postgres booth and got some good ideas on encryption.

Green and Sustainability

Green and sustainability was our third topic of interest kind of just wanting to see if anyone had any good ideas. As always in communities, you can often bring up a thought with someone, in this a case a member of the SoCalLUG (LInux Users Group) who knew of someone who was doing sustainable things who would be at SCALE. We tracked her down, and she referred us to a Software Developer and Engineer she worked with to pursue our thoughts. We tracked him down and found a kindred soul but one who was way beyond where we were at in our thinking. Individuals are really making strides in all kinds of sustainability projects from power to food to life styles. We even found an individual who been to the Urban Homesteaders where we had taken many of our initial ideas based on their video and having met them and spent considerable time at Green/Energy Conservation Show where they had been speakers and had a booth.

Fascinating all.

  • Stumbleupon
  • Delicious

Posted in Community Building, SCALE | 1 Comment »

Relevant Content: Are you a Grocery Store or Restaurant?

February 12th, 2010

One of our developers went to an Agile Software Development Seminar last month and came home with a book:

The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator by Rich Mironov

Though written for Enterprise Software Developers, an entirely different audience from most entrepreneurial businesses, he had a number of interesting take aways for a small business. One in particular could be very helpful when trying to develop Relevant Content for your Web Sites.

As we have been discussing, Relevant Content is probably different from most traditional marketing and sales materials (see the prior blog post on this subject). The primary difference is that Relevant Content is trying to answer a question or solve a problem as opposed to selling a product.

In his third section: The Almost-New-New Things: Agile and Software as a Service, he has a topical area: Grocers and Chefs: Software Service Models. This concept could be very helpful for small businesses trying to create Relevant Content for their sites.

Taking a little liberty here, it is a very simple conceptual proposition.

The business owner needs to ask:

Are you a grocery store? Where everyone comes in and buys the piece parts to assemble a meal. In which case adding Recipe Cards like Trader Joes could help….Like I want to make this meal…what ingredients do I need and where can I find them? And, the final result is primarily the customer’s responsibility.

Or, Are you a Restaurant? Where the customer wants everything thing done for them. And, the final result is primarily your responsibility. Are you fast food, a chef, ethnic, etc.? Everyone expects you to provide, facilities, personnel, wash the dishes, etc.?

As a footnote, this Restaurant style probably also exposes the business more to a Web 2.0 ranking informally or formally like Yelp.

With these two concepts in mind, the Entrepreneur business owner could then ask are we a Grocery Store or a Restaurant or both. And, then design the Web Site with the appropriate Relevant Content. If you provide both options, then make sure your site is segmented properly with appropriate Navigation so the Web User or Web Customer understands what you are offering and how it answers their questions or solves their problem.

  • Stumbleupon
  • Delicious

Tags:
Posted in Relevant Content | 1 Comment »

Some Thoughts on moving from Traditional Sales and Marketing Techniques to Relevant Content on the Internet

February 10th, 2010

Two events triggered these thoughts: 1) One of our new customers basically wanted a SEO/SEM plan for the coming year, and 2) a Holiday visitor kept translating “Relevant Content” to “Value Add” , a term he understood in previous conversations.

We believe now there is a subtle difference between Relevant Content versus Value Add and Sales Materials. ( See our Blog Post on Relevant Content and the Intentional Visitor)

To us, these have become very different concepts which are diverging with time.

In the past decade or so, we used to spend considerable time on Product Positioning, Competitive Analysis, Development of Sales Calls, Sales and Marketing Collateral, etc.  Just about every salesman and marketeer used some variation of a Sales Funnel for the sales process, and some form of FBR’s (Feature, Benefit, Response) feature by feature for Sales Call planning and objection handling, and competitive positioning, etc. Often culminating in a Value Add type of statement.  Though still interesting, most of this effort assumed that one could get in front of a prospect or customer in some form of direct marketing organization or Channel.

Then along came the Internet with Organic Marketing, and Web 2.0 which were essentially passive in nature and expected not to interrupt the Prospect or Customer but allow them to find you.  A very disturbing concept to hyper active salesman and marketeers, and especially the owners and CEO’s of entrepreneurial businesses who are used to being in theoretical control of their destinies.

We absolutely love Dave Evan’s question in his Book Social Media Marketing: “If I couldn’t interrupt you, how would I reach you?”  (see the prior blog post Relevant Concept Books).

This quote basically says it all.  So, if you believe that the Web User is going to search on your Value Add statement, feature benefit list, competitive analysis white paper, etc…..good luck, they might, but most small businesses should expect that the Web User will be searching to solve a problem.  This problem might be solved by a feature, or a value add configuration, etc but we suspect that the search would not be in the specific language for your product or feature.

And, we suspect that Google is really just trying to get “Relevant Content” to the Web User in response to their search which may only be loosely related to the terminology we have used for years or even decades to describe our products in a direct or active sales and marketing environment.  And, with an increasing amount, of Web User generated content in the Web 2.0 space, there is not a reasonable expectation that the salesman/marketeer can control the message as we did with advertising (another Evan’s observation).

We have move to a Question/Answer or Problem/Solution framework for Relative Content.  In other words, what Question is the Web User or Web Customer trying to answer or what Problem are they trying to solve.  If you can reformulate your sales and marketing materials to this framework and often simple format, then as a small business owner you may be on the right path to Relevant Content.

We have a lot of work to do on our website to reformat it to Relevant Content.

  • Stumbleupon
  • Delicious

Posted in Relevant Content | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries