The Marketing Team in 2012

Categories: Marketing Created by ben van 't ende
The marketing team has stepped up activity in 2012 and has regular online meetings and 2 or 3 live meetings a year. The main achievement of this year was the relaunch of typo3.org on april 2nd of this year.
Recently a code sprint was held to streamline the current instance of typo3.org. Four code sprints for maintenance of typo3.org are planned for 2013. The marketing team has it’s own project page on Forge:<link http: forge.typo3.org projects team-marketing-public>forge.typo3.org/projects/team-marketing-public, where issues can be submitted and/or it’s progress followed. The marketing team has requested a large budget for 2013 and additional information on the budget usage was sent to the Expert Advisory Board. A lot of topics that were discussed also depend on what budget will be available for marketing activities in 2013. There are a number of sprints planned for next year like several typo3.org sprints, a marketing sprint together with the editorial team and the design team and a sprint where we hope to kick off the National Committee pages. The last meeting of the marketing team for 2012 was held end of November in Wiesbaden. Present were Boris Hinzer, Ben van ‘t Ende, Kian Gould, Alain Veuve, Christian Händel, Berit Hlubek. One of the main issues the team discussed concerns the re-branding. We have quite some marketing material that needs to be adapted according to the new branding. The association flyer has to be updated and adjusted to a general design may be based on the generic flyer but completely recognisable as being two different flyers. We also need a TYPO3 Flow flyer and we need a generic TYPO3 project flyer explaining the different products. We agreed the format should be updated to double-page A4, because that is the most common format. The National Committee pages have been under discussion for quite some time already. The idea would be that we have centralised national pages, so local initiatives do not have to depend on top-level domains like typo3.fr or similar. Usualy these domains are taken and not easy to gain control of. we will use subdomains for that like fr.typo3.org. The topic is quite important but currently we have no manpower to execute this project.We want to have a sprint for starting this topic and get the structure of a “master”-microsite ready. Technically we will create a master branch in typo3.org and create clones for every needed national committee. But the big point is creating the concept. Currently there are two promotional video’s in production. One is sponsored by Pixelant from Sweden. This one is nearing completion. We received a first version that looked very promising already. Of course after the rebranding some stuff needs to be adjusted in that video as well. Nivel from Columbia is also working on a video, but that one is still in a preliminary stage. The marketing team feels it is important that we show our presence at developer oriented conferences like OSCON and FOSDEM. Some internal promotions have been undertaken as to ensure TYPO3 will be at FOSDEM.
The marketing team would like to give more attention to promoting the new products, Neos and Flow. The marketing team is there as a content provider. The coming Inspiring Flow conference is a good opportunity to work on promotion for the new products. We discussed current conferences and how a current strategy is currently lacking for the conferences.  As with writing this report there is an event committee in the works that will be cooperating with the event organisers about the contents of the official events for 2013. <link http: www.cebit.de>CeBIT that will be held from March 5 -9, is always an important event for TYPO3. In previous years we have been present in the Open Source arena and last year we were hosted by Mittwald in a big booth together with Dupal, Wordpress, Joomla and Magento. This year the Open Source CMS’s unite in <link http: www.cms-garden.org>CMS-garden. Representatives of the different OS CMS’s organise this event, which will also feature a CMS challenge. The event is still in the preparation phase and is looking for sponsoring. The marketing team still needs helping hands for the following tasks: go to events and represent TYPO3, write blog posts for T3BLOG.com, manage Professional services Listing and case studies and for writing articles. The marketing team will represent itself more on TYPO3 events like TYPO3camps to reach this goal. As a long term goal the marketing team would also like to get more people inside the teams. For that purpose we would need to create a job-portal. This also depends on the budget the marketing team gets allocated for 2013. Maintenance of t3blog.com is not working as it should lately. We found out there are some technical issues that need to be solved. If that is fixed new entries will be shown again on a regular basis