TikiFestMontrealNov2008 Marketing Group

This page should merge with Communications Team.

Marketing, design and promotion GROUP

Now Matthew and Pauline have finished travelling, we will be creating a summary of what happened at the TikiFest and asking for more comments and contributions. So watch this space!!

Matthew and Pauline will be getting all interested parties together to discuss where people would like Tiki and the community to be in 5 years time. Taking this as the starting point, this strand will have as its objective to come up with a marketing strategy to get it there. They wrote two leading books on Internet Marketing (Cybermarketing and Cyberstrategy) (Seach on http://www.amazon.co.uk/ ) but only see our role ONLY as facilitators of the discussion and are very keen to get as much input and contribution as we can prior to meeting up at this event.

We will also have some fantastic Internet designers actually coming up with some designs to present to the community. So if you feel you would like to contribute to the look and feel, please join us in Montreal or be around when they are published to give them a good thrashing!!!

What we want is for everyone to feel they can contribute to the whole issue, even if they can't be at the TikiFest!! The plan is to send everyone a market research questionnaire to find out how people are using Tiki and how they want to use it and how they want the community to grow and develop.

Please, please, please fill the questionnaire in and pass it on because this will direct where Tiki will be in 5 years and it will focus people's efforts.

Normally marketing and design is done by a bunch of people unconnected to the actual product sitting in their little office on their Mac miles away from reality. Having marketing, promotion and design done by a whole community is really leading edge and innovative and very exciting so please jump it and make it happen with us.

Where do you want Tiki to be in 5 years time? Why? How? We need you thoughts!!!!!!!!!!

Marketing strand, an agenda

We have a suggestion for how, at least some part of, the marketing strand of the TikiFest could go. In summary we feel that a very critical issue is to create a core team to define and then manage a marketing plan for Tiki. The primary motivation for this was the appalling presentation of Tiki on the web at present and a clear misconception that marketing is all about t-shirts and brochures.

So we thought the following would be a good way to start the Marketing strand of the TikiFest:

In general It is important to form a focused strong cohesive marketing-driven group as quickly as is possible. In my experience it is very difficult to make headway in areas such as marketing, if new people and their ideas arrive halfway through (everything stops and we get lots of "well I think .." comments, what we should aim for is "WE think ..."!). So we should find a room where we can get all those interested together and have a full day with few interruptions in order to start creating a common understanding and allow all the issues to be opened up and explored as a group, this is a key first step. The group can then go out and solicit other opinions as a second step. So I am going to ask all those interested in marketing to commit to a the whole of the first day and a half of the second on this meeting. This gives us time overnight to think about what is happening and reflect.

The short term goals of the meeting:

  • Define target customer profiles for Tiki.
  • Write a marketing plan for Tiki.
  • Write a design brief for the new identity of Tiki including the promotional web site.

The long term goal To explore innovative ways to "do effective marketing" in an Open Source/Open Development collaborative organization

Session 1 Introductions and presentations. We thought the first session of the marketing group could be called "introductions and presentations". My wife and I have prepared a presentation and we hope others interested will also do the same. A presentation is a good way to give all those interested a bit of "prime time" to contribute their ideas. I have enclosed below an outline of our presentation to give you some idea about what we hope to talk about.

Session 2 Brainstorming the big issues. We are both worried that the group is going to drop down to the detail of promotion activities, such as web site design, viral marketing campaigns, documentation, video production, T-shirts and so on. This is the result of a marketing plan not the start and we believe it will be a waste of a great opportunity if we don't start with a concrete marketing plan. We are recommending starting with strategic marketing, then moving into implementation only when the group has signed off the strategy.

It seems to us the "big questions", which should be discussed by the marketing group before anything else, are:

  • Do we agree that for Tiki and its community to flourish it needs directing?
  • Who are our "customers" - what kind of customer profiles can we identify?
  • What will they define as success over the next 5 years?
  • What direction does Tiki need to go in to achieve this?

We assume that the marketing group will need some help in coming up with a group consensus on the answers to the big questions. They are difficult to answer and everyone will need some time to think about them. It will be necessary, early on, to keep our minds above the immediate issues of today, and help us focus on the future and "Marketing strategy", as opposed to immediate promotion activities and product development interests.

We have an open inclusive technique where everyone is able to contribute and prevents one or two forceful personalities to dominate. We don't want to annoy anyone with a forceful personality, we want to handle gently those who like it exactly how it is! Also we don't want to give the impression we don't like what has been done over the last 5 years.

So how to achieve this? We use a methodology which gives each participant tools to contribute democratically and time to think. We trust the methodology to enable people to contribute and create ideas! Pauline, Soozy and I have run literally hundreds of such workshops in our time. We became so confident in our method we used to do 10 sessions of 10 participants at a time with a whole conference full of potential customers! It was very successful, it is fun and very inclusive. It works well with these soft issues and it is self documenting, i.e. we can put it up on the tw.o web site for everyone to see afterwards. The technique was developed at the Cranfield Business School by one of our friends, Victor Newman, a professor in Knowledge Management.

The only thing we need is the correct venue, the method requires a room which has the following properties:

  • Quiet and with only those taking part in it - no distractions or people passing by.
  • Lots of wall space with a means to attach a lot of Flip Chart paper to them, without getting in to trouble. We will need to put paper up nearly all the way around the room!
  • Lots of post-it-notes, flip chart paper and Thick felt pens to write with. Thick pens stops people writing to much! (We will be providing this!!)

A normal office type conference room is usually ideal.

This session which will take 4 hours split in to two sessions. It won't work at all if people join half way through. But anyone is quite able to contribute they don't just have to be marketing types.

The technique is very useful when you have a problem and you want to flesh out all the issues and group/prioritize them. It was one of our "top techniques" when we ran our company.

Session 3 Build the plan for the rest of the week-month-year It is presumptuous to decide what happens after the brainstorming session. However, and at the very least, we hope we can create a written design brief from which those interested in creating story boards for the new Tiki identity can get to work! I hope this design brief will start an open and collaborative graphic design effort. I can imagine promoting this design brief to "the world" and creating an focused but open collaboration between designers, illustrators, photographers and web designers. Quite how we get the "community" to chose will be something we need to discuss!

After Tikifest I really hope this Tikifest will kick start something big! We have quite a lot of time to dedicate to this activity and would be most willing to act as the hub for the Tiki Marketing and identity efforts. Tiki is great - it is now time to show people it is!

Please, we welcome any comments on this agenda.

Call for marketing presentations

So my wife and I are creating a presentation :

Title: Marketing Open Source It's all about perceptions!

  • Marketing and Promotion - they are not the same! (A quick introduction for those non-marketeers who are taking part)
  • How can we market a community effort?
  • It's all down to perceptions - but who is looking? (Introduction to the importance of customer profiles)
  • Our markets - meet the people. (Our sugestion as to the target customers for Tiki)
  • What do they see now? tw.o - the web site. (a look at the tw.o web site and stats)
  • What do they think now? Results of e-mail survey.
  • A suggested plan for the TikiFest.
  • Let's do it and document it.

It is not very formal or fancy!

Would you like to do one as well?

Pascal will have a presentation on Positioning Wiki's in the CMS space. How to position TikiWiki with Profiles

Marc Laporte: About customer profiles, here is a page: Use Cases which can help. It would be good to identify user types that:
  1. Will make good use of Tiki's strength (ex.: advanced projects)
  2. Will use Tiki often. (Ex. web agencies)
  3. Have some sort of existing network that can serve for Viral Tiki. For example, researchers know and work with other researchers.
  4. Can contribute back (ex.: developers)

What other user types are there?

  • It would be good to identify

Look forward to seeing you very soon!

Essential reading


Page last modified on Friday 25 January 2013 07:29:01 GMT-0000