Today is Saturday, and I've been meaning to get out in the lovely Texas heat and mow the lawn for an hour or so. Two cups of coffee later, it's time to link-dump and get the hell out of The Network for the afternoon. (Well, I'll be cheating: I've queued up several podcasts for mow-time).
Tracking the Low Barriers to Entry Marketing Idea
Here are some links and notes for later synthesis into more on what I'm tentatively calling "Low Barriers to Entry Tech Marketing." Truth be told, this is really one of the key ideas that Steve and James have been working on and talking about for sometime. Documenting it is just a low-hanging content-carrot.
"Markets without Marketing" - Doc Searls emphasizes relationships in tech marketing, along with many other tactics and anti-patterns for tech marketing. "Don't ask how we can make money with this technology. Ask how we can make money because of it."
Which makes me think, "the problem with relationship driven marketing is connecting people together in face-to-face. It's a matter of scale. How do you get enough spokes people in each locale to talk with customers and community? Could sales-people being doing this?" Sure, blogs are a way to do that, but I suspect there are more "meat-world" activities that people could be doing. I've been casually watching how JBoss approaches this, and I'll have to start paying more attention.
how to keep your meme alive - "There’s certainly a lesson here to be learned from Apple. Two words: 'Playfulness' and 'Re-invention.'"
Press Quote by Blog - you'll notice in this story about the OMC that I'm quoted via my blog. "Normally," reports email or call me, but here they've done a very blog thing and just quoted my past comments on the topic without getting me involved. Which is great: this shows that press quotes are another channel for my blog influence, one that has the same "zero cost to manufacture" price of software. It's like a time-shifted interaction with me.
Time-shifting - time-shifting is when you have an interaction with someone in non-realtime. Podcasting is time-shifting. Reading blogs is time-shifting. Marketing by PDF is time-shifting. More and more, the "feature" of time-shifting is standing out to me as one of the key features of Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it). There's more thinking to be had on that, but what the immediate advice is that companies need to start hosting their webcasts and presentations as MP3 videos on their sites. Presentations done by a human are great (in addition to normal marketing channels), and companies/projects should start putting more videos of those up instead of locking them in the time-specific webcast format. The IBM analyst relations site does this well, putting MP3 recordings of most conference calls online (sadly, there's no podcast...sounds like an opportunity ;>). Another example: I learned a ton ("got marketed to effectively") by listening to Pervasive's MP3s while mowing the lawn (a podcast RSS feed would be nice for easier downloading).
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