Stephen OGrady

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• Stephen OGrady
• Senior Analyst
• RedMonk

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Questions We Ask

• Who got Linux to where it is today?
• Who got Steve Ballmer so excited that he needed
  surgery on his vocal cords?
• Who made PHP so popular that it runs on a third
  of the world's domains?
• Who made Firefox so popular that it's been
  downloaded 100M times?
• Who makes open source the most disruptive trend
  in software today?
• Who made Eclipse the de facto Java IDE within the
  enterprise?

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Answers We Hear

• Analysts
• Weren't these the same guys that predicted that
  NT would wipe out Linux?
• CIOs
• Sure, CIOs love free and unsupported software
• Press
• Are they driving agendas or following them?
• Vendors
• Which came first Linux and PHP, or IBM?

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The Right Answer
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It's Not Just Us
Apple is kicking our behind once again. How will
Microsoft respond? Steve Ballmer already gave
our vision developers, developers, developers,
developers, developers, developers, developers,
developers, developers, developers, developers,
developers... Source Robert Scoble, Microsoft

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Still Not Convinced?
Then explain the success of these two projects
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The Next Question We Ask

• If we can all agree that
• Developers are critically important
• Developers will play a major if not determining
  role in the success or failure of your products
• Developers, like any audience, will have things
  to say about your products
• Then why are you not engaging with them?

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The Answers We Hear

• Shouldn't we be selling to the CIO? I thought
  developers didn't buy things
• We are engaging with them we advertise in
  magazines, on the web, and so on
• Developers will flame me Slashdot style if I try
  and engage with them
• We trust the media to get our messages to the
  development community
• I'd like to, but I'm not sure where to start

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The Reality

• Developers have become nearly immune to
  traditional marketing
• Developers spend far more time online than they
  do with print publications
• Developers would rather talk with someone than be
  talked at by something
• Developers are starting their own mini
  communities via blogs
• Developers don't just code at the office
• Developers are not content to sit back and wait
  for updates or news they can make their own

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What To Do? Conversational Marketing

• Markets are conversations.
• Markets consist of human beings, not demographic
  sectors.
• Conversations among human beings sound human.
  They are conducted in a human voice.
• Whether delivering information, opinions,
  perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous
  asides, the human voice is typically open,
  natural, uncontrived.
• People recognize each other as such from the
  sound of this voice...

www.cluetrain.com
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Stalking The Wily Developer, Pt 1 Scout

• First, know where the conversations are
  happening
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Forums
• Listservs
• IRC
• del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Wikipedia
• Sourceforge
• Freshmeat

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Blogs Centers for Conversation
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Wikis Collaborative Authoring
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del.icio.us Social Bookmarking Link Blogging
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Flickr Social/Group Photo Sharing
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Stalking The Wily Developer, Pt 2 Learn

• Once you know where the conversation is
  occurring, find out what's being said
• Use the tools and services below to track what's
  being said outside of your scope

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Example What's Being Said About Eclipse?
The Java IDE--there's really only one,
Eclipse--is a 105MB zip file. You know how I
installed it? Unzipped it. How do I run it? Click
on Eclipse.exe. You know how I install Studio?
Pay 2500 for top version (not out yet btw but
will be about that amount or more) Insert DVD
answer inane questions walk away for 2 hours
return with at least 1.5_G_B less diskspace and a
doubled registry size. Source Michael Stuart ,
former Microsoft employee http//minimsft.blogspot
.com/2005/09/three-quick-things-jobs-dynamics.html
c112698172605533703
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Stalking The Wily Developer, Pt 3 Participate

• After getting a feel for the various communities,
  try participating
• DO's
• Accept that the conversation is two way
• Speak in a regular, human voice
• Be respectful, candid and honest
• Have a thick skin
• Give back to the community(ies)
• DO NOT's
• Attempt to market or sell in community channels
• Do not attempt to change opinions
• Do not delete or remove posts or content
• Do not talk down to your audience

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Forget ROI, What Are the Benefits?

• You may find yourself with new, unpaid
  evangelists
• You may find yourself with a wealth of new
  documentation
• You may find yourself with detailed and
  comprehensive feedback (MySQL)
• You may greatly improve your search presence and
  ranking (BLOG)
• You may find yourself with an improved product
• You may find yourself being introduced to new
  partners or customers

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Who's Doing Conversational Marketing?

• Claire Giordano / Jim Grisanzio - Sun
• http//blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh
  http//blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris
• Ed Brill IBM
• http//www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/
• Ian Skerrett / Mike Milinkovich Eclipse
• http//ianskerrett.blogspot.com/
  http//milinkovich.blogspot.com/
• Jeremy Zawodny Yahoo
• http//jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/
• Robert Scoble Microsoft
• http//radio.weblogs.com/0001011/
• Virtually every community on the planet has a
  Planet aggregated feed
• Planet feeds for Apache, Eclipse, Gentoo, GNOME,
  Hula, KDE, MySQL, OO.o, Python, XML, etc

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