All, This is a great thread for me to jump in and introduce myself. I am going to be supporting the adoption of OpenOffice in Ecuador and Latin America. I have over 10 years of software product marketing, technical marketing and program management experience and have recently shifted my focus from commercial to open source solutions.
In my opinion, OpenWrite and OpenImpress can hold their weight against their MSFT counterparts. I have not used OpenCalc to the Expert level (sadly I do use Excel in this capacity) and know that many companies integrate Excel into their financial applications for consolidation and reporting as well as other back end and "mission critical" applications. This dependence can negate a CTO's interest in OpenOffice right off the bat. A way to break the barrier is to also have companies adopt OpenOffice as their default or an option for integration to their back end and financial applications. I think we need to form a working group to identify the integration as well as feature/function gaps that OpenCalc has to Excel and prioritize these requirements into future development. Taking this initiative a step further will be to approach vendors that use Excel as their client interface to also support OpenOffice. If either of these initiatives are already in progress, I would appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction. I am exciting to join the team and hope that I can contribute a great deal to supporting this worthy initiative. Regards, Sean W. O'Quin Quito, Ecuador -----Original Message----- From: Graham Lauder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 10:09 AM To: dev@marketing.openoffice.org Subject: Re: [Marketing] Return to the marketing On Thursday 27 September 2007 18:51, Erwin Tenhumberg wrote: > > Things like the OOo facebook group, more Youtube Videos and more > > presence on things like stumble upon, digg, youtube, slideshare, > > mugshot and so on. > > > > Also the need of more non profit entities in countries so that > > openoffice.org scale to large deployments. basically we are finding that > > OOo vendors hav e a hard time justifiying the product and the brand. > > Two resources that I frequently find useful in my discussions with > ISV's and potential customers / OpenOffice.org users as well as the > press are the following two wiki pages: > > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Solutions > > > I'm sure that there are a lot more large scale OpenOffice.org > deployments than those listed on the market share wiki page. > Therefore, we should frequently remind people (e.g. the members > of the native-lang community) to update the list by adding > their local success stories. In addition, it would be great to > get "video endorsements" from some of these OpenOffice.org users, > so that we can publish them on sites like YouTube. One of the problems I come across with regard to this is that for a corporate, there is no advantage to advertising the fact that they use OOo but there are some good reasons (ie: BSA Audit) not to. > > The same is true for the solutions wiki page. We need to capture > all the solutions that integrate with OpenOffice.org and/or > complement OpenOffice.org. > > > All the best, > Erwin One of the biggest issues that I find is that companies try to do this under the radar to avoid the possibility of an audit as well as doing it as cheaply as possible. Unfortunately while buying MS won't often get an IT person sacked they perhaps think that spending money to achieve painless migration is a no-no. For me, in several cases, this has resulted in me getting a call after the process has begun. The result often is that initial work with a companies staff is about rescuing the migration, about winning hearts and minds which has been made more difficult by a wholesale sudden change in software. We shouldn't be selling the software. As Ian pointed out in an earlier post, the software sells itself when you get the chance to show it off. We need to be selling the migration process. We need to be selling people ie MarCons, making them easily contactable. Developing local businesses around OOo support, developing partners in local markets. Local people/companies so that we can promote the message that spending on Open Source is keeping money local. I'll reiterate what I said in the other thread in terms of the marketing budget. Allowing 80% online marketing and 20% Promo materials. For online given the limitations of the past, we need to steer people from online ads to the why.openoffice.org page. Set it up so that there is a prominent link that with a single click sends an mail, either direct to someone in their local area or directed to the MarCon List or even another list, say; [EMAIL PROTECTED] (This latter would be my preference, it allows quality control) This is a much smaller step than going straight to the download page and expecting a new user to immediately trust us enough to download. While that puts a bit of a burden on the MarCons to respond quickly and reliably, it will only be for a short space of time. This requires a few things to be put in place. The Why.... page will have to be slightly modified to emphasise the contact button Set up an [EMAIL PROTECTED] maillist Establish policies and procedures for managing those enquiries(Most important!) Another point/suggestion I'd like to test the water with: This advertising has to be about brand awareness, presales if you will. The best medium for raising brand awareness is Television. The most wide spread and trusted TV medium in the English speaking world that has a very high corporate viewing audience is BBC World, not huge in the US I know, but outside the US, it's influence is large. I think a portion of the online and the promo parts of the budget spent there could be very valuable if we agree that we are confining this campaign to English speaking regions. This subject to cost of course. 4 x 30sec placements per day for a week timed for late prime GMT UK programme (10pm and 1am GMT) and late prime Asia Programme would probably be the minimum useful. (As an additional note here: the "why.openoffice.org" lends itself really well to a TVA. Punchy and memorable. Very easy to turn to a call to action.) Cheers GL -- "GET LEGAL - GET OPENOFFICE.ORG" http://why.openoffice.org ISO 26300 compliant Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html INGOTs Assessor Trainer Moderator New Zealand (International Grades in Office Technologies) www.theingots.org.nz GET DRESSED GET OOOGEAR http://ooogear.co.nz --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
