Marketing has en ever increasing importance in Open Source projects. The TYPO3 community of course is our most important marketing resource. A thriving community improves TYPO3's visibility. 2012 is an important year for marketing. Read how the marketing team kicks of 2012.
In a <link http: news.typo3.org news article marketing-team-meeting-january-2012 community-2011-2012>previous article I pronounced 2012 the year of marketing and with the ever increasing communication about what is going on in the community and most specifically in the teams, it is about time to shed some light on the activities of the marketing team. Some stuff we discuss in the marketing team is non-public as is the case with board and steering committee matters. For example stuff we discuss concerning membership fees or questions we raise towards other teams could be among those non-public items. That is partly the reason we did not publish anything before I guess.
The marketing team consists of 8 members. Philip Randt, Alain Veuve and Frederic Gaus recently joined the team. We have a nice cross-section now from the TYPO3 community. Kian Gould leads the team. Kian is the owner of AOE media, steering committee member, fundraising leader and hosts most of the marketing team meetings, Peter Pröll is a member of the TYPO3 board and owner of Alinbu, Berit Jensen works at Networkteam, is a CSS master and does a lot of works for the Phoenix project, Eike Diestelkamp is a steering committee member and owner of HDNET, Philip Randt is the owner of agentur überblick and member of the design team. Frederic Gaus is one of the CEOs of Flagbit, Alan Veuve is CEO of the Swiss agency CS2. AOE media, CS2 and Flagbit are all platinum members of the TYPO3 Association. The community manager, Ben van ‘t Ende, is also part of the team.
This is the agenda we had for the meeting of Thursday January 25, 2011
- National Committee Pages
- Communicate Marketing PR - Community
- Status relaunch typo3.org - Relaunch planning
- Professional Services Listing
- <link http: demo.typo3.org _blank>demo.typo3.org
- Introduction Package screen cast
- platinum member banners
- cmsexpo chicago
- t3blog
- trainingweek
- white papers
- fundraising
- image video’s - promotional
- cebit 2012
- (local) exhibitions
- General Marketing strategy for 2012
The team has been largely occupied with the relaunch of typo3.org in 2011 with two sprints dedicated to the relaunch. The effort took longer then expected and is far more complicated then estimated at first. The team discussed the relaunch together with Joern Bock, one of the project managers of the relaunch, and constructed a new time-line for relaunch with a relaunch date that is not that far away anymore. On March 1st we will announce the exact relaunch date. The documentation rendering for extensions was fixed recently, but the general documentation rendering does not fully work yet and as such is regarded as a blocker. Login is finished and tested by several people. To be sure the login functions properly it needs to be tested by another group before we can consider it done done. The final stage will be migration of content, news, security bulletins, frontend users, URL handling and removing test data. With the relaunch www.typo3.com and news.typo3.org will be merged with the new www.typo3.org. We shortly discussed the rotation of the platinum member banners. Berit will take care of a changed behaviour. User testing provided us with some insight on how the homepage of preview.typo3.org is viewed. Especially to newbies the current homepage is not clear enough. A decision was made to have a newbie oriented image in the stage area that is show when the visitor enters the new website. The section “What is TYPO3?” will also receive an extra highlight.
Most items discussed in the marketing team get assigned to one or more members with or without a deadline. Some items are a team responsibility.
There is a need for national committee pages. As we get more local initiatives the necessity for ‘official’ pages for these local initiatives also arises. We will provide country based subdomains like for instance <link http: us.typo3.org _blank>us.typo3.org and<link http: fr.typo3.org _blank>fr.typo3.org. The content of these pages will be for national users, customers, companies and will introduce the national committee. The layout based on a common template will be based on the new <link http: typo3.org _blank>typo3.org website. The team has some likely candidates in mind to prepare these template and Ben will lead this operation, which makes sense as community manager anyway.
A <link http: demo.typo3.org _blank>demo.typo3.org is in the works for some time already. Frontend editing is problematic atm. RTE Patches made by Eike’s developer for 4.7. For now demo without frontend user. Release of <link http: demo.typo3.org _blank>demo.typo3.org not established yet. Responsible Eike and Peter.
The idea came up to have a screencast about the Introduction Package. We have a <link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3-screencast _blank>screen cast team since two months. Ben will bring it up in the next screencast team meeting and ask what the team thinks about it and could come up with a suggestion for a story board and if they want to accept the task and a prepare a timeline.
TYPO3 needs to grow more in the US. We were present at several fairs in the US already. Alain wil take care of CMSExpo. this year. Participants: Seth Conley, Kian Gould, Alain Veuve?), Benni Mack (one of the keynotes). The TYPO3 booth will be there as well since we are sponsoring the event. The Marketing Team budget pays for Benni’s presence and ticket for Ron Hall. Alain will write a small article on our participation. Philip will create a banner for the event and Ben will make sure it gets a proper place on typo3.org.
References for <link http: www.t3blog.com _blank>www.t3blog.com need to meet certain 2 of the criteria.<link http: www.t3blog.com suggest_a_site.html _blank>www.t3blog.com/suggest_a_site.html. Some submissions wre reviewed after a complaint they where not published and approved some more then we did at first. Alain’s team is currently publishing the submissions for <link http: t3blog.com _blank>t3blog.com. In the meeting we also came up with some other suggestions for some big websites. Currently there are not that many submissions online. Kian will check the functionality of the submission form.
For CeBIT 2012, Mittwald Hosting has a large booth in Hall 6 where there are commercial CMS-es as well. Mittwald offered a space for TYPO3 and 4 other OS CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento). We have no presence in the Open Source Hall this year. The basic team is taken care of with Peter Pröll, Ingo Renner, Eike Diestelkamp, Ben van ‘t Ende. We will order some name-tags and agreed to have some common dress-code for CeBIT. Frederic also volunteered to join the team for a few days. We have enough marketing material for the event, like pens, the new flyer and lanyards.
Alain and Eike presented a concept for a TYPO3 training week for computer-related students. The event will have the goal to promote TYPO3 among students. Target is to do the week in August at the Linux Hotel in Essen. Ben joined the team as he also had thoughts along those lines.
We need some white papers for an easy overview of features and reasons to use TYPO3 for decision makers. Unfortunately all content and suggestions we had gathered was destroyed, with the complete shut-down of <link http: www.ietherpad.com _blank>www.ietherpad.com(because of that unfortunate incident we now have our own <link http: notes.typo3.org _blank>notes.typo3.org). Philip and Ben are working on the flyers. One practical idea is to convert our current flyer to a white paper.
Proposal from Jürg Simon from CS2 for a promotional TYPO3 Video. A video for decision-makers not longer then 90 seconds. We have 3 proposals with different angles. The team proposes to do a combination of the 3 proposals. If we need to have something like that made it will cost a lot of money we do not have for this purpose. We might scout art academies or alike if we can find someone that does it as an assignment for school. We are looking at having the video done as a 3D animation. We use native speakers. Imagine what this CMS can do for you? We can use the ending of the presentation Kian and Kasper did where all website screenshots form the TYPO3 logo. We will have a look at what other CMS have and then would like another draft. Alain is responsible for this topic.
First attempt with a fundraiser for TYPO3 failed for various reasons. It is easy to conclude there are a lot of companies that do not support TYPO3 with a membership. After relaunch a neutral call centre will call all potential candidates and ask if there is an interest to have a call back. Center the fundraising effort around the new Professional Services Listing for the relaunch!
- Market to the already existing members. Mail if they are interested to upgrade their membership.
- Mail companies form the existing listing
- Mail additional agencies that are currently not a member. There is a list available.
There is an active policy atm to call people who do not continue their membership after first having sent several mails. Frederic and Kian will take care of the mailings to the afore mentioned lists.
A current list of OS and CMS related events was scanned and it was decide which ones are worthwhile to attend as TYPO3. We missed the chance to participate at FOSDEM again unfortunately. It is not an event where we should go as TYPO3 Association, but we certainly need a bunch of developers there next year.
The marketing team also stays in touch online and another meeting is planned for February. You are welcome to give some feedback or suggestions. You can do so by sending your email (with marketing in the subject) to <link http: news.typo3.org news article marketing-team-meeting-january-2012>info(at)typo3.org.