Marketing free software
The first thing I did when I started to work here, was reading some articles about marketing free software. There is a lot of information and books about marketing, there is also a few things wrote about free software, but there is not many stuff about marketing and free software.
But, anyway, I found two interesting articles, which gave me a better sight about our company and the environment we work in:
This process led me to write some conclusions down (in Spanish language):
- El márketing en Firefox: o cómo generar marca a través del swarming.
- GNOME y Ubuntu: o el márketing como una cuestión logística.
- GNOME Inside.
Lately, there was another interesting event: the creation of initmarketing company, by Sandro Groganz and others. It’s quite interesting to me mainly because of one initiative they launched: InitMarketing.tv.
During last months, they were publishing some interesting interviews with relevant people on free software arena, as for example, an interview with Stormy Peters, the executive director of GNOME Foundation (which I strongly recommend you):
Some free software projects started to care about marketing some years ago, but it’s a hard task to do yet, because the way they are led: towards the community instead hierarchical structures. That special condition converts the act of marketer a free software project or company a quite different (and exciting) task. You have to know how the community works to be effective in your commitment and avoid misunderstandings. As John Williams said:
Marketing is not about convincing people to buy (or use) your product or service. That is selling. Marketing is about matching the output of your organization to the demands of the (chosen) market. Put another way, marketing is about finding out what people want, and then giving it to them.
For that, I’m pretty sure that learning about community management is a worthy task for anyone who wants to be involved in free software projects.
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