Marketing of Drupal

we're mostly friendly. and mostly fun. but we're pretty geeky. in a cool way, of course. but this month we're a bit melancholy on the news Crystal is leaving us for Seattle. :-/

the good news is that we taped our meeting. ya, real geeky. but LA area is HUGE. and sometimes making it to the meeting in person can be difficult. so there you go... we're geeky but thinking about everyone that wanted to join us, but couldn't.

Drupal has been selected as a finalist for the SourceForge 2008 Community awards in 5 categories.

Special thanks to Nicholas Thompson, Michelle, Rahul and others in who were involved in the nomination and promotion of this award: http://drupal.org/node/267469

I originally posted this discussion to the Portland OR DUG and was then asked to repost it here.

Recently NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) put out their 2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey. You can find the full text and numbers for this survey on their web page, though it will cost you $50 if you are not a member. They are a valuable nonprofit themselves, so supporting them seems to be a good thing, and this report would go a long way to helping many of you convince your clients to use Drupal, more than you could achieve in $50 of billable time in many cases, so it would be $50 well spent.

In any event I thought I'd at least share the basics of that report, on how Drupal ranked in customer satisfaction and related areas. Remember though that this is not representative of all your clients, but is nonprofit focussed, which is a group probably more likely to use free tools before most others, so it is unlikely that the world at large matches these numbers, fascinating as they are.

I am pleased to inform the Drupal community that we will be installing an advanced enterprise analytics solution HBX, on Drupal.org. This is possible due to a generous donation of this HBX software, valued at over $10,000. These tools will give very advanced reports of how users are using Drupal.org, which forms they are using successfully, what page flows are working and which ones are not. The goal of these analytics tools is to provide the Drupal community with an ongoing user experience toolkit with which to make improvements to Drupal.org.

Are you interested in helping to spread the word about Drupal? LinuxWorld Expo is coming to Moscone Center Aug 4-7. Come share, learn, and have fun with other Drupal and open source fans. LinuxWorld Expo is geared more towards enterprise solutions. If you're interested in open source (beyond Drupal), this is a great opportunity to learn from others and to share what you know about Drupal.

Back in May Forester research contacted the Drupal association asking if they could talk to some Drupal customers and vendors. We connected them with a couple of Drupal consulting shops and in turn some of their customers. Here's the report and a nice summary by Matt Asay, from Alfresco:

Quoting the report from Matt's quote:

Drupal.org Redesign Business Objectives

These objectives were developed by Michael Meyers and Laura Scott of the Drupal association.

OVERVIEW:

Acquia and AF83 are pleased to announce that we are have purchased a booth to represent Drupal at LinuxWorld. The booth with equipment value is worth almost $6000. If you'd like to work the booth at LinuxWorld or are interested in contributing to the booth costs please let me know.

Tue., August 5, 2008 10:00am – 5:00pm
Wed., August 6, 2008 10:00am – 5:00pm
Thu., August 7, 2008 10:00am – 4:00pm

If you are available to be a volunteer at the booth please contact me.

I am arranging for a Drupalcon Booth at OSCON. Let me know if you are available to represent Drupal during the following hours.

Exhibitor Registration/Move-In:
Monday, July 21, 12:00PM - 6:00PM
Tuesday, July 22, 9:00AM - 6:00PM
Exhibit Hall Hours:
Wednesday, July 23
10:00AM - 4:30PM
6:00PM - 7:30PM (Expo Hall Reception)
Thursday, July 24
10:00AM - 5:00PM

Location: Oregon Convention Center
777 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
Portland, Oregon 97232

I have to submit the booth staff by July 14th, 2008.

I've been working with members of the Drupal association, particularly Jacob Redding and Moshe Weitzman, and the infrastructure team to help calculate some statistics to measure the growth of GDO. I've got a blog post going into more detail coming up. I'll link to it shortly.

Kyle Else from Toursheet LLC has signed the contract for the booth. I am working with Andy and Anne from promethost to raise money for the booth expenses and to help coordinate volunteers.

http://www.hostingcon.com/2008/attend/floorplan/

Kieran

Acquia would like to thank everyone who voted for our 1 minute video submission for the Enterprise 2.0 contest. We've now made it to the second round and we've added an important section to the video, the Drupal Ecosystem, with dozens of Drupal consulting company logo's.

How did we select these logo's to represent the Drupal ecosystem:
1) Looked for sponsors of Drupalcon Barcelona and Drupalcon Boston
2) Drupal Association Organization Members

Acquia has submitted a 1 minute video about Drupal to the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad contest. The video site, is actually a Drupal site. If you get a chance to watch this one minute video and vote, it will help give Drupal some exposure at Enterprise 2.0.

http://launchpad.enterprise2conf.com/node/14

Miami-based design firm studio:module picked up 4 awards last Friday from the Horizon Interactive Awards for sites it had built using Drupal 5.

Over 1,000 sites were reviewed in this competition for creativity and originality, overall design, technical merit, effectiveness and user experience. Here's a list of the Drupal sites from studio:module that won:

This page is a resource for members of the Drupal community. If you would like to promote the Knight Drupal Initiative, you can use the following materials.

For more information about the KDI, see the program goals and the FAQ. To submit a proposal, please review the application tips and the application process.

Program summary

A one sentence summary of the KDI.

* The Knight Drupal Initiative is an ongoing grant program for Drupal and is designed to help people improve their communities by providing a robust, freely distributed, open source digital publishing platform.

Elevator pitch

For use when you have thirty seconds to explain the KDI.

* The Knight Drupal Initiative is an ongoing, open grant funding process for the Drupal open source project. We want to enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry. We will provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all. Our goal is to encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas.

Three Drupal sites are up for Webby's: http://www.theonion.com, http://www.changeeverything.ca/, http://maplight.org

If someone has a chance to make a front page post that would be helpful.

Hello, in approximately 90 minutes Barry Jaspan and Jeff Whatcott will be demoing how to build a bicycling community with Drupal. Acquia is one of 6 finalists in this contest and after watching the competition there's a good chance we can win.

Voting will be Moses SMS messaging service: In order for us to win we would like you to text 'acquia' to ###### (A number to be disclosed when the voting opens).

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Kieran

I've been pretty cynical in the past about blogs. I am now a convert.

For Drupalcon we identified over 70 blog posts that helped drive awareness and ultimately successful fund raising and successful attendance. For the recent Drupal testing sprint in Paris, France we used the same technique.

What worked for the testing sprint was trying to justify the expense and working on the anticipated outcomes of the sprint. We used blogging to raise awareness and attract sponsors ultimately raising funding for 8 people to attend Paris.

Congratulations to Drupal for winning a CNET Webware 100 award in the publishing category.

webware.com — Culled from an initial set of over 5,000 nominations, voted on by almost 2,000,000 people, Drupal shines as a premiere platform for social publishing. Congratulations to the Drupal community for your hard work and great success.

Digg it here

From Robshouse.net

The rumor is that Drupal is going to be announcing winning a big award. If you are a blogger and willing to get the word out, while respecting the confidentiality of this disclosure until it's officially announced please get in touch with me or Dave Olsen.

We will prep you with some details and you can help us to write a press release.

I just wanted to share these screenshots somewhere...

It's old news now, but interesting to capture, perhaps.

[Updated with a cross-post to the marketing group.]

The Knight Drupal Initiative is an open grant process for Drupal projects. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/10459 for more information about the KDI.

Here's a current list of tasks that we need people to take on:

• Write some grant application tips for Proofread http://groups.drupal.org/node/10462 for clarity.

• Design a logo for the Knight Drupal Initiative! Done, considering no alternatives were submitted.

• Create some marketing materials that explain the program. These should include:

The Flourish conference is next weekend (April 4th and 5th), and it seems like a logical place to do some Drupal marketing.

It looks like we'd still be able to get a table.

Are there other folks planning on attending that would be up for setting up a marketing table?

This program needs a good name -- something catchy and easy to remember. Ideas? Add them below.

Posted http://drupal.org/node/233090 .... Your feedback is invited. Thanks!

Hi Friends!!!

We are thinking of organizing a Drupal Camp here in Ahmedabad and thought of having some suggestions from all Drupalers to organize this camp.

We are expecting more than 300 attendees to join us in this camp. Any comments/suggestions on tracks, sessions, length of the event, ways to better the event etc. are more than welcome.

Since Drupal is a community driven CMS, we thought that the community is best to give us useful suggestions to organize this event.

Rajat
Gloscon Team
Ahmedabad, India

UPDATE

If you would like to be involved in the encoding of DV content, please post the following information and we will contact you with login information for the content.

• Your machine(s) specs - processor/memory/OS
• Your internet connection specs - up and down
• How many hours per week you can devote to encoding
• Do you have the ability to edit DV content prior to encoding - this is primarily to trim beginning and end of video along with boosting gain if needed.

[Also posted in http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-redesign-analysis]

I know I am weighing in on a sensitive topic. I found that out yesterday today with my poorly received attempt at a humorous blog post entitled "Decapitate Drupal, please". I was unprepared for the negative response I received (though I did get some positive response as well). Someone rightly pointed out that Drupal Planet was not the right place for the discussion and suggested I come here. So, here I am.

Hello!

The category "Digital Communities", which met with great interest and participation during the last four editions, will be awarded again
by Prix Ars Electronica in 2008.

“drupal“ has been nominated by one member of our Advisory Board in this category and we would like to encourage you and your team to

If we are going to generate more traffic for Drupal 6 I think we need to focus on current non Drupal CMS users - since they are familiar with what their CMS can / can't do. Drupal 6 is more elegant than Drupal 4/5 and deserves some attention from them. The drupal.org site is way more organized (one thing that turns new Drupal users off) than it was a year ago and there is talks of a new UI for Drupal.org. Now is the time to really dig in with marketing efforts.

I wrote a review of Drupal installation and how easy it's become, complete with screenshots (and a screencast later). Best for convincing people to switch to Drupal! Posted this in my Drupal blog

This is a wiki page for notable live blogs, user feedback, and marketing-related discussion on the latest Drupal 6 release.

PRWeb link: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/2/prweb697163.htm

Checkpoint before the release using Google blog search

1.1.2007 - 31.12.2007, "Drupal 6" --- about 1,363, "Drupal D6" --- 0, "Drupal six" --- 2, "drupal version 6" --- 0, "drupal6" --- 71

technorati search for "Drupal 6"

http://technorati.com/search/drupal+6

Digg marks (NikLP) - 13 Feb 08 - Submitted to Digg by rdouglass

Submitted: 14:45 GMT

Here is the code for the official Drupal 6.0 release Digg post:

This version floats left, like on Drupal.org:

In response to the long slogan thread, I have proposed that we come up a level and create a positioning statement for Drupal. Read this article for background, then come back here and join in.

Positioning Statement Template
1) For [target customers]
2) Who want/need [specific problem / compelling reason to buy/adopt]
3) Our product is a [name the product category in which you play]
4) That provides [key benefits that solve the problem described above]

I have made buttons for drupal.org users, to point to theirs profiles.

Cross posting from here: http://drupal.org/node/219476

There will be a Drupal site showcase and case study contest at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon.

Submitted sites will be voted online and judged by a panel of community nominated judges and some great prizes will be awarded to the winners! This is a chance to have all your hard work creating amazing Drupal sites recognized.

The slogan proposal wiki and no follow discussions got me thinking about more seo stuff related to Drupal.org

One big thing that's missing is a meta description tag. This doesn't affect ranking so much any more, but it's often used in results listings and sometimes relevancy. It's also a good place to put all the buzzwords we might not want to stuff into a slogan.

Here's a first run:

<

blockquote>

The local folks in attendance at the Drupal 6 launch meeting probably came away with a good feeling about our group. Firstly, A lot of the agenda points have many similarities to what we discussed at our first meetup. Secondly, the release of Drupal 6 (if all goes according to plan) just happens to coincide with our next scheduled meeting next Tuesday hosted by Lullabot.

I've tabulated some data based upon the commit messages for Drupal6. Note, this is not a good judge of contributors. A better judge would be "people who have "commented on an issue and changed the status" or "uploaded an attachment" or even "posted a comment" but this is one way of gathering the data.

I wanted to capture my method and share the output data. The data is available here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pVuTBhrgLH93h7VQNyyynXw

Please fill in.

For Panatlantica's customers, Drupal 6 means, i.a.:

• Increased scalability
• More mature code base
• Optimized for high performance
• Integrated i18n
• More complex web application due to new Triggers and Events system

If I (ccharlton) could recommend a 5-point version:

• Scalable and Stable
• Really Friendly Interface
• Multilingual Support
• Tons of Modules & Themes
• World Famous Framework & Community

Hello, the Drupal 6 release is imminent.

We've done a good job building up some of our marketing capabilities over the last several months. We need a push over the next few days.

1) We need an official press release.
2) We need to familiarize ourselves with http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0.
3) Robert Douglass is going to lead the Digg and Reddit publishing effort. We need a document explaining how to add social news widgets to your blog.
4) We need Drupal 6 videos, I believe they are already in production.

I just posted a link to my delicious account on Dooce, a very high traffic blog, switching to Drupal. It's a great case study of a high profile, high traffic blog going Drupal.

Hey - I'm leading the effort to host a booth at Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). I think a Drupal banner would be cool. I can't fund the procurement myself but think I can make it happen if I can get a commitment of funding in short order. - Markus Sandy has offered a budget up to $200! Yay!

I was sent this link
http://guide.conecta.it/ which in turn links to 2 PDF documents produced by FLOSSMETRICs and OpenTTT (Both European Union commissioned bodies).

The first is the FLOSS Guide (2Mb) (cc) FLOSSMETRICS - which is an education paper on FLOSS. Which could give people ideas on how to market FLOSS in general. It even includes a section of FLOSS business models.

Hello, new Drupal association board member Narayan Newton, just calculated that there are 16 000 subscribers to the Drupal Planet feed. Unfortunately, the marketing team lacks a way to get Drupal marketing messages out to those bloggers.

If you are one of these bloggers, please subscribe to this group. If you know one of those bloggers please leave a comment on their blog asking them to subscribe to the Drupal marketing group.

I found this coming in from Drupal planet http://www.tech-wanderings.com/drupal-nofollowed-too-pervasive.

Greg Holsclaw talks about how nofollow attributes could be hurting Drupal (rel=nofollow being a well intentioned way of deterring spam. Something that has managed to keep the ratio of spam to real content on the web down to a respectable 10:1 :P) Basically, he points out that most internal links on drupal.org get the nofollow attribute attached to them.

Greg makes a number of good points, but I think the two most important are: