I have been tracking the conversations in here. It's good to see things are moving on this front. From reading the discussions so far, these are my thoughts on the process I see:
Time-boxing is good, closing comments is not.
Especially after only an handful of comments and only a couple of days. There's Drupal people in all of the timezones all over the world. Give things a bit more time. Why close comments at all, why not be clear on where you are in the process without shutting down avenues for further discussion?
Leave room for the discussion to evolve
I see a lot of replying to nearly every individual comment, pointing out where people agree or not. This narrows the discussion down to whatever you guys pick out as good, useful etc and lessens your chances of getting a different perspective. You need as many insights and perspectives as you can get. Give things a bit more room to breathe.
Other research?
Groups.drupal.org is notoriously hard to find, so you'll only reach a fraction of the audience, with a slant towards the more experienced Drupal folk. I hope there's more input being gathered from other sources as well: What are the key points from the last couple of Dries's keynotes? He also has some year-in-review posts and other more visionary posts on his blog. How do other Drupal firms big and small tout the benefits of Drupal? Any reviews of D7 out there? Etc. I found that the book 'The Ad-Free Brand' by Chris Grams provides solid suggestions on how to run this process in a more open and collaborative environment.
Again, it's great to see this initiative getting of the ground. The approach is sound, I'm confident it will lead to actionable results that will help getting the word out about Drupal.
Comments
Agreed
I have similar concerns about the relatively small number of folks actively participating in these discussions (who seem to represent a fairly small subset of the Drupal business community, which is in turn a fairly small subset of the Drupal community at large) as well as the focus on our existing audience.
If the goal is to "grow Drupal faster than it is growing now", than necessarily we will need to reach out to and involve people who are not already part of the community. This is where the additional research and audience identification comes in. People who are already immersed in the Drupal community certainly have strong ideas and preconceptions about how and where we can grow Drupal, but those assumptions need to be validated externally before we act on them. If we did this, I suspect the answers might surprise many of us.
I also understand and appreciate that branding should be aspirational, but it also needs to be rooted in honesty and authenticity. A brand that tries to tell a story that's out of synch with reality will be rejected by customers. We need to be careful that in our attempt to preach to the unconverted that we do not make promises we cannot keep. We need to be honest about who and what Drupal is. To me, that's summed up perfectly in the invitation on our website: "Come for the software, stay for the community".
I'm also concerned that while there's been a fairly good framework and structure laid out for discussion there doesn't seem to be a well-communicated roadmap for where we're going, or what the deliverables are at each stage in the process. Having a better understanding of this might help keep us more focused as a group and less susceptible to veering off into tangential side conversations.
Integrating the Marketing Communications
Hi George,
Thanks for your post, it's good to see we're all thinking along the same lines in terms of opening up the discussions to a wider audience.
Over the last year I've attended various CXO events throughout Europe and the U.S. where we had the same conversations again and again, and at some of them we started up an initiative, a group, a project, etc. to bring it all together. This just resulted in many different efforts starting up, some gaining momentum, most not. I could also see Drupal's growth growing at a far faster rate than we could keep up, in terms of "the talent gap", marketing, etc. - not everyone can attend an event, not everyone can understand drupal.org, etc.
Back when I was in charge of marketing within the proprietary software world we would of course have one central place where all this would come from, and that is all we are doing here. We are all working hard to bring more people into the group, and we can set up pages to point to other places where relating things are going on that people might not know about, like your group - I forget its current name - doing core logo work.
I have spent a lot of time this week contacting everyone who attended the CXO Process Days in Amsterdam (I managed to connect with 50 out of the 60 via linkedin and/or drupal.org, a few already here and joining in), I am now moving onto the next CXO event I went to - probably products in Rome. I also have our Brighton Drupalcamp next weekend, and am already two days late with rent so do apologise if it's not coming in fast enough for you.
With regards to the plan and timing, yes we should increase the time we can talk on certain topics, but this has not been done before in one place, so flexibility is the key. What has been built up over 12 years in terms of code we are only just beginning to do here, so I fully expect it to be a little in flux to start with. We should also look at the value we are already seeing from these conversations, many are excited and some people are, for the first ever time, able to have their own voice, from such countries as far afield as Korea. Sure, there's been places before, but without Integrated Marketing Communications it simply won't work.
As for honest branding, I totally agree - many people have no idea what Drupal is, they think it's just a CMS and expect everything to work and if it doesn't then it's Drupal's fault. They also think it's difficult when actually it's incredibly simple - if you teach people in the right way.
We are succeeding here already, and that's down to spending six months carefully planning a strategic approach to being able to open up this one central place where we can discuss things in an open and honest manner, and it's great to see you on board and joining in. I do ask though, if you have some time, please personally invite people here as I have been doing, and keep joining in the conversations - we have a lot of time to catch up on and with Drupal 8 approaching fast (or slower or faster, I haven't read the latest post yet) we need to ensure we have picked up the ball and are running with it in time for that.
Best,
Steve
Point taken
Well said.
I can only give a my personal opinion as a relative outsider, looking fron the outside. Maybe the community can benefit from my personal view.
Bring it on, Joost.
We'd love your personal view, Joost.
What IS Drupal Marketing to you? What's the brand? Who's the target?
What problems do you experience in "selling" Drupal that you believe BAM could address and possibly alleviate?
I love hearing from fresh voices. :-)