Acknowledgements - Isn't this a great conference?

We greatly appreciate the efforts of those who helped to make this conference come together:

Jon Stahl - and thanks for giving me this venue to present
Paul Everitt - for his inspiring talk yesterday
Alan Runyan & Alex Limi - for having the vision and persistence to bring Plone to where it is today
Joel Burton - for tirelessly training so many new people to use Plone
Everyone here today and attending this conference
Many others who I can't acknowledge personally
THANK YOU!

Improving Plone and Zope Market Acceptance

Improve
Plone and Zope
Market Acceptance
Step-Function Sized Breakthroughs

Profile the Parties in the Website Developement Ecosystem

Too many parties with competing interests
Agreement on nothing except for a desire for "goodness"
My goodness is not your goodness

Small Businesses (1-10 employees, no full-time IT staff)

Well served by pre-packaged sites: Yahoo, 1and1.com
Funds are scarce
Difficult to justify large expenditures

Medium Sized Businesses (10-100 employees, full-time IT staff)

Opportunities Begin to Emerge
Written Requirements
Dig for the pain
No pain, move on (next)

Large Businesses (100+ employees)

Enterprise-wide procedures and policies
Consistency and standardization are key
Meet this with standardized "proposal templates"
Create enterprise-quality white papers

Governments & Non-Profit Organizations

Look for open-source mandates
Dig for pain, money, and decision making authority - or grow old waiting
Reduce technical language and jargon based selling where necessary
For non-profits, emphasize Plone's ability to quickly publish new and updated material
Industry Advocacy Groups vs. Humanitarian / Altruistic Groups

Developers Presently Using Other Development Tools

Reach out using non-partisan advocacy
Do not disparge competing products
Emphasize the fun parts
Give them a Plone / Zope instance to play with

End Users

Profile the end-users
Put that information into your proposals
Be specific, use details, quote end-users

Marketing Challenges to Overcome

Plone is often anonymous outside our community
How anonymous?
Using Factiva, in the last 3 months there were:

22,438 news stories with .asp near http
8,853 news stories with .php near http
281 news stories with "Visual Studio"
< 15 news stories containing "Zope" or "Plone"

Robert's Suggestions

Create and use taglines consistently - for years
Create and tell great stories about Plone - Norwegian heritage could be good
Let me put the shields up...
Implement a consistent file extension for Plone pages - .plone
Create a formalized knowledge base of case studies
Start a PR initiative
去中国 - 是大的机会
Go to China, It's a Big Opportunity

Questions?

Robert Burgoyne, 包若柏
True Blade Systems, Inc.
New York, NY
1.212.542.3144

web: www.trueblade.com

email: plone@trueblade.com