What is open-source marketing?

Steve Ruebel wrote last week about Mozilla and open source marketing.

First, I like what Mozilla is doing with the Spread Firefox campaign and am supporting it. I would describe the NYT ad campaign as fund-raising though. Nothing more. Yes, it is for open-source and the response has been great, but it is not open-source marketing.

Did Mozilla go to their evangelists and say, "How can we launch 1.0 with a bang?" I don't know. I would love to see in the FAQs how they came up with the idea. They do have a forum for Marketing Ideas, but like many forums, it is hard to see what it bubbling up and being used.

They have hired a PR agency to help with the ad placement and managing the story. Did they ask if the community wanted to help? I think they could have pulled together a stable of professionals who would have loved to help with this launch.

I want to say again I like what Mozilla is doing. I want a different definition and better examples for what open source marketing is.

More soon...

Comments

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

I liked that Mozilla was trying to tap into their customers for evangelists and that they even have a public forum soliciting ideas for marketing is a step above 99.9% of companies and organizations.

But I'm still stratching my head about the NYT ad campaign. I know what a WSJ full-page ad costs for instance and I think the money could have been better spent. Sticking with PR longer rather than a big-bang advertising approach seems to have been a better option. But like you, I'm not sure WHO is making these marketing decisions.

[Ted Haeger]

From my own blog, I concede to Todd on terminology, as I have been blogging about marketing open source software (Novell Linux Desktop, specifically):

I found the remarks of Todd Sattersten interesting. He makes the point that the NYT-Firefox event was really a community funding drive rather than open source marketing, and then goes into what some attributes of "open source marketing" would be. Mr. Sattersten's approach to the subject would make the subject of my blog more appropriately called "Marketing Open Source" rather than "Open Source Marketing."

Ted Haeger
http://reverendted.blogspot.com