[Plone-conference] Openspace: growing plone | as a brand

Armin Stroß-Radschinski developer at acsr.de
Tue Oct 21 21:07:51 UTC 2014


Hi Chris,
thanks for writing this up.

What if we move the target for this topic more towards "Growing Plone as a brand" and its value and a more positive experience recognition.
I am persistent on this...

And a lot of the passion of the past came from this sector (see the other readings of this thread).

We can always improve to communicate the USP's of Plone and make them much more popular and well known in "our" target sectors for their outstanding qualities. And I agree with Paul that we need more "Campaigning" than "Marketing" bla bla or impressing install numbers.

Valueful points to put force at the lever are
* Promote public relation featuring Plone making people and organisations successful.
* Avoid talking too much about features and focus more on success of (organisations) using Plone. This makes it obvious we have those features!
* Get more success stories published and spread them wider (like participating in the CMS-Garden etc.)
* Not to forget the force of our Community Culture. Make it easy for our Plonistas to spread the word (cool Plone 5 shirts! ;-) we have them in Bristol!)

This will help to get results and the benefits we are looking for:

* Making it easier to promote Plone in high value markets and volume and niche sectors as well.
* and make a better living from it (for the people making their earning with Plone and the users)
(OK, the shirts are just fun...)

We still get very positive results for our (german) Plone brochure and now the PSF Python Brochure for exactly serving for this outside our "family".
 
I am far from counting too much on dead trees, but taking the messages beyond some fences is the important element. Chose the medias you want, but make sure to feed them outside of twitter and facebook as well. CTO's and CFO's are not all on facebook. Making videos (like the excellent work done by abstract) and getting more featured articles in the old channels ist OK too! 

We failed doing just that at all in the last years!

And finally the product behind of course has to meet the expectations of 2020 as well.

I am still very sad that we (including my attempts) were not able to get Plone.com into place in the expected quality in limited time in the last years. We still need to show off better "Plone is alive". 

The Open Space topic by Dylan : "growing Plone" is a good viewpoint for our horizon. It will help to reach and keep the critical mass we need to survive as a project and increase our impact. Lets focus the impact of the name Plone in the world again. Bind it to value. All is allowed, even fun!
Hopefully we will get exciting input in Bristol. 

-- Armin

Are our currently active communication people at the conference (Christina, Andy) ?

Am 21.10.2014 um 20:00 schrieb Chris Calloway <cbc at unc.edu>:

> At the same time, I don't want to see a roadmap that makes us captive to very narrow visions. I don't agree with statements like, "Out of the box the product is not providing much value in comparison to a rapidly progressing market," and don't wish to be boxed in by statements of what Plone isn't, shouldn't be, won't be, or cant be. There's nothing that comes close to Plone out of the box. It is still the fastest path to a functioning CMS that isn't already pre-installed by vendors.
> 
> (And yeah, the pre-installation ubiuity issue has been flogged to death. And yet I don't see it as a positive outcome in the old roadmap. Nor having your Plone reboot with your server for that matter. The community obviously recognizes the value of pre-installation after some of that discussion a Vagrant kit is now on the download page. Maybe these are thing that are valuable to Plone as a product and not so valuable to contributing consultants.)
> 
> I gravitate more toward visionary statements that reinforce what made Plone great like, "If that could be solved in some way, programmers/integrators/tinkerers could use this system again for whatever purpose they like: being it a large enterprise site, a small high-end experimental webapp, a backend webservice." It wasn't that Plone was the "only" CMS in the beginning and created a drive for 100% of market. It was that Plone was the only CMS you could bend to your will with some ease.
> 
> It seemed to go off the rails with a parade of contributing consultants proscribing either increasingly onerous but politically correct ways of doing that one tiny little thing that was so effortless in other CMSes, or things that we weren't going to do to reach that degree of effortlessness because it wasn't in the contributing consultants' interest to make the politically correct Plone less obtuse. So I'd like to see a vision that subverts that tendency and thinks in terms of Plone as a great product that people want rather than depending on the "trust and loyalty" of increasingly obscure micro-niches.
> 
> The latter as marketing is setting ourselves up for failure. People who write checks have no trust or loyalty. I saw this over and over again and it was how Plone had its lunch eaten by lesser CMSes. It was all what have you done for me lately. As the saying goes, "If you have to explain it, you've already lost the argument." Plone out of the box needs no explanation. It just works and works well. All that's left is the commitment to make it more amazing as a product that sells itself and then market segments, and even explaining your marketing strategy to your trusted and loyal customers, matter less and less. Otherwise the future is similar to being an increasingly smaller community of highly paid Cobol maintenance consultants. Not what I signed up for.



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