marketing

In our experience, every marketing team is different--but increasingly they have a few things in common. For a start, it's rare to find the whole team in any single place on any given day. More often, we find teams distributed across cities, countries, and fairly frequently, continents. The members of a team have also changed: full time employees are usually in the minority among a collection of contractors, freelancers, and agencies who are treated as an integrated part of the team, rather than a simple supplier. » Read more

By now, I'd wager cold, hard cash that you've heard it all before: marketing's just not good enough, cool enough, interesting enough, fast enough, real enough, tough enough, slick enough, noisy enough, responsible enough.

And, as rousing and convincing as those arguments are, you've probably also concluded that the state of the art as it stands is, truth be told, more than OK to get the job done.

Yet, while we might not want to admit it, I bet we all know it: we can--and should--do better. » Read more

Over the years, I've had many people label me as a marketing guy just because I help build brands. I don't like being labelled, but I particularly don't like that marketing label. Why?

In my view, traditional marketing sets up an adversarial relationship, a battle of wills pitting seller vs. buyer.

The seller begins the relationship with a goal to convince the buyer to buy something. The buyer begins the relationship wary of believing what the seller is saying (often with good reason). It is an unhealthy connection that is doomed to fail most of the time. » Read more

Brand managers, customer experience executives, and marketing VPs, I need to tell you something. And it might hurt.

Your strategies and innovations may be brilliant, but whether they’ll come to fruition is entirely up to some employees who are quite far down on the corporate totem pole. Most of the time, they aren’t even hearing about the “new direction” the company is going in, and if they are, they’re rolling their eyes at it.

I know, because I’ve been there. And I’m pretty sure it all started with a Beanie Babies calendar. » Read more

As open source software becomes more mainstream, it's easy to forget how amazing it is. Countless individuals, donating their time and sharing their brainpower, work to build a shared infrastructure on which the world's computing is done. Amazing. Even more amazing, in survey after survey, the big reason open source contributors give for their participation is that it's "fun." Even more amazing than that is the rate at which this technology improves because people are having fun building it.

Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia that anyone can write or edit, is no less amazing. Yet as it gains legitimacy, the exciting story of how it is created and renewed--daily, perpetually--is de-emphasized. Yes, Wikipedia is imperfect. By design, it will always be a work in progress. But because there is a collective human impulse to share knowledge, the fact that anyone can improve it any time they want, means that someone always will.

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When it comes to running an open source business, the question I’m asked second most often is "How do you market your services?" (The first is "How do you make money selling free software?") I wish I had a concise, step-by-step answer, but I don’t. The best I can do is to relate some of my experiences.
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There's a great new blog post up this week on the Harvard Business Review blog site by Bill Taylor, founder of Fast Company magazine and author of the book Mavericks at Work, entitled Brand is Culture, Culture is Brand.

As I read the post, I couldn't help but smile, as the primary point of the article is one about which I feel strongly. From the article: » Read more

Robyn Bergeron gave a Friday talk at Ohio LinuxFest titled "OM NOM - Open marketing--not obscure marketing." This post is based on her talk.

Marketing is typically done in a room of people who are removed from those who develop the things they're marketing. Open marketing (not obscured marketing!) is about turning that paradigm upside-down and doing marketing as openly as development. » Read more

Maybe some day we'll look back on the role of the manager in our organizations and laugh.

Such a quaint trend. Kind of like having The Clapper in every room of your house, or wearing multiple Swatch watches, or working out to Richard Simmons videos. Each seemed really helpful at the time, but looking back, we kind of wonder what the heck we were thinking. » Read more

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to meet Jim Gilmore, co-author (with Joseph Pine) of the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. I first read the book a few years ago, and it really struck a nerve for me—these guys were on to something.

So I convinced Jim to subject himself to a Five Questions interview about the place where authenticity and the open source way intersect. » Read more