Helping Doc
Thank you, Doc Searls, for rescuing markets from marketing -- Markets without
Marketing. The two need not have anything to do with each other
now.
I've always disagreed with the assertion that marketing owns markets.
One has lived forever and will continue to thrive despite the other and
go on to serve new generations, while the other is no longer effective
and will not survive much longer (at least in its present form) because
it doesn't understand what the other one is. Practiced
traditionally, marketing many times does more does more harm than good
and uses
entirely too many resources in the process. Really great marketers have
always been able to transcend marketing, though, and those guys are
extremely valuable to any organization or any community.
In Doc's article, he's looking for some examples of great marketing in this new age of open for his talk at OSCON in Portland. I'm not in marketing, but I can think of many examples from the OpenSolaris project. But I wouldn't term them as "marketing" because they were all done by a mixture of program managers, engineers, executives, marketers, and non-Sun developers and system administrators. Also, they were all based in simple, open, and direct communications. Messages were rejected. Focus groups were rejected. Press releases were largely silent. Top down dictatorial management was absent. There were very few filters, and almost none as the project matured. Engineering led the effort, and engineers made all the important decisions since the program was designed to engage developers. Interactions were done in the open in a variety of forums -- conferences, blogs, mail lists, customer briefings -- and were diversified and distributed horizontally, not vertically. Launch activities were discussed with the community on open lists, and the engineers led the launch in every important way with literally hundreds of blogs. Anniversary activities were planned and implemented openly as well. Highly technical SCM discussions and evaluations are taking place in the open as well as governance and development discussions. Again, no filters. Now, was it all perfect? No. We got more open as we learned and experimented, and we got better at it as we went along. But was it a big step for a big corporation? Absolutely. Was it marketing? No. But did marketing participate? Yes. And that's the key. Participation in a market no longer takes place through a funnel. It's distributed and multidimensional, and there's probably no need to call it "marketing" any more.
I've written a lot about this since I started blogging and working on the OpenSolaris project, and my views have evolved. To me, this is all about business, and good business is all about basic common sense. Every entrepreneur I've ever met in every industry knows this instinctively. Hell, the newspaper boy knows it. It's all about talking openly and honestly to a customer or developer or parter or whoever to build a relationship based on trust and performance so both sides benefit equally. That's it. No fancy "social software" tools needed. No messages needed. No spinning needed. It's not based on open source (I saw it in construction two decades ago). It's not based on the Internet (basic face-to-face networking far pre-dates technology ... ask any craftsman in the world). It's just good business and basic common sense, that's all, and the best marketers know that.
In Doc's article, he's looking for some examples of great marketing in this new age of open for his talk at OSCON in Portland. I'm not in marketing, but I can think of many examples from the OpenSolaris project. But I wouldn't term them as "marketing" because they were all done by a mixture of program managers, engineers, executives, marketers, and non-Sun developers and system administrators. Also, they were all based in simple, open, and direct communications. Messages were rejected. Focus groups were rejected. Press releases were largely silent. Top down dictatorial management was absent. There were very few filters, and almost none as the project matured. Engineering led the effort, and engineers made all the important decisions since the program was designed to engage developers. Interactions were done in the open in a variety of forums -- conferences, blogs, mail lists, customer briefings -- and were diversified and distributed horizontally, not vertically. Launch activities were discussed with the community on open lists, and the engineers led the launch in every important way with literally hundreds of blogs. Anniversary activities were planned and implemented openly as well. Highly technical SCM discussions and evaluations are taking place in the open as well as governance and development discussions. Again, no filters. Now, was it all perfect? No. We got more open as we learned and experimented, and we got better at it as we went along. But was it a big step for a big corporation? Absolutely. Was it marketing? No. But did marketing participate? Yes. And that's the key. Participation in a market no longer takes place through a funnel. It's distributed and multidimensional, and there's probably no need to call it "marketing" any more.
I've written a lot about this since I started blogging and working on the OpenSolaris project, and my views have evolved. To me, this is all about business, and good business is all about basic common sense. Every entrepreneur I've ever met in every industry knows this instinctively. Hell, the newspaper boy knows it. It's all about talking openly and honestly to a customer or developer or parter or whoever to build a relationship based on trust and performance so both sides benefit equally. That's it. No fancy "social software" tools needed. No messages needed. No spinning needed. It's not based on open source (I saw it in construction two decades ago). It's not based on the Internet (basic face-to-face networking far pre-dates technology ... ask any craftsman in the world). It's just good business and basic common sense, that's all, and the best marketers know that.
Good Post
Posted by Christopher Mahan on July 26, 2006 at 03:02 AM JST #
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on July 26, 2006 at 10:00 PM JST #
Posted by John Dodds on August 09, 2006 at 09:15 PM JST #
[ It's interesting how you associate marketing as anything that originates from the "marketing" department. ]
How's that? I think that's the way it used to be, sure, but on OpenSolaris I describe (and have described for three years) dozens of examples of so-called "marketing" originating from multiple levels of the company. I've often said in my blog that the best marketing at Sun comes from the engineers on the OpenSolaris project. I know program mangers who are fantastic marketers, although they'd never be associated with the term. Same for engineers. And the same for some non-marketing executives, too. And the same for some marketers as well. Some people in marketing are really great marketers.
[ This whole debate seems to be lost in a semantic mire. ]
I totally agree. Marketing has become too fat over the years, and open source is trimming it out.
[ In my opinion what Doc was talking about was promotion and bad promotion at that - this is totally different from what marketing should be. ]
What should marketing be in your opinion? To me, marketing is *all* about promotion and little else. The fact that most traditionalists do it poorly doesn't mean that it's not their function.
[ Given that you come from that field originally, I think you get that already. The dissconnect seems particularly wide in technology and I've been asked to write more about this in my blog - I hope by tomorrow - I'm sure a number of techies will be pissed by it but that's not my aim. ]
Cool. I look forward to it. I've put your feed into my bloglines account.
Posted by Jim Grisanzio on August 10, 2006 at 02:15 PM JST #