I ran out of time last night and ended up rushing through the end, plus I have a feeling there may be people in the group who may be interested but don't generally attend meetups. Wanted to take a moment to post the important bits.
What's happening
Per my lightning talk last night, there is an effort underway to organize collaboration and shared resources around marketing Drupal itself (as opposed to those who provide services). This came out of a BoF at DrupalCon Denver. The BoF was attended by about 3 dozen people from various Drupal agencies and functions, and inspired by chatter in recent months on blogs, podcasts, etc.
Why we are doing this
Drupal has become a serious player in the CMS market, but still has a lot of untapped potential in terms of clients, users, and technical minds who have not felt a compelling need to switch over. While businesses--and many competing technologies--have substantial, centralized branding and marketing efforts, we do not.
Drupal also can be tricky to explain to someone who is not already familiar with it. How it works, why it's unique, what it can do and how it stacks up with other platforms are all communication challenges that crop up again and again. If you go looking for information about Drupal, you find a lot mixed messages, misperceptions, and bad information.
Without a lot of shared resources, when we try to engage someone new to Drupal, we are each reinventing the wheel all the time, which is inefficient and not very effective. Very often, we decide to instead focus our limited marketing resources on those who already want Drupal, avoiding the issue altogether.
The goal of a pan-Drupal marketing effort is to make the ideas and concepts of Drupal more accessible to those who are not already familiar, and to provide resources for agencies and practitioners. To accomplish this, we are working to get Drupal as a whole thinking and acting on branding and marketing, and get the marketing and sales people in the different companies talking to each other and sharing ideas.
Where things are at
Presently, things are in a very early stage. The main tasks right now are defining the scope of "marketing," understanding community needs, and creating long-term processes and infrastructure. There is a task force of 8 or so people, led by Ben Finklea of Volacci, who are working on these immediate tasks.
The outcome of the current work will be a proposed charter, to be presented to the Drupal Association at its next board meeting in hopes of obtaining its support and some resources. It is important to note that this is not presently something that the DA is officially involved with.
While we work on figuring out infrastructure and a permanent home, we have an Open Atrium instance set up for near-term collaboration.
How to get involved (even if you aren't a marketer)
We are a few people trying to put together a system that will help address the needs of 600,000--the more we can understand the community and its needs, the more effectively we can do this.
At this point in time, we need to understand:
- "Pain points" such as challenges in communicating the idea of Drupal and its concepts
- What's important to you in this
- What concerns you about this
- Your ideas for making this better
There are lots of ways you can get involved, depending on your level of interest. Even if you aren't a marketer yourself, your feedback and insights can help us to create something that reflects the spirit and values of Drupal as a whole.
- Passing interest: Subscribe to Marketing of Drupal on GDO. While that group is not exclusive to our effort, we'll post occasional status updates there.
- Strong interest or get involved: You can observe the conversation on our Open Atrium instance, or create a user account if you want to be actively involved. There really nothing there yet (we're working on it!), and we are hoping to set up a custom domain soon, but you can find it here: http://www.marketingdrupal.com
- Something to say privately: If you have a question or concern you would rather convey privately, feel free to ping me via my contact form on this site.
Thank you for reading. I hope some of you will join in the conversation and help to keep this moving!!