[Catalyst-dev] Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft

[John Wang]

On 10/18/06, Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:On 10/17/06, John Wang <
johncwang at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev
and
>> doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who
is
>> interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
snip
>
> The single biggest obstable you are likely to find in the real world
> is I suspect that there aren't enough perl programmers. There are far,
> far more PHP and Java programmers than Perl, and thus the scalability
> from an *organisational* point of view is much better. If we can hire,
> we can grow. If we can't hire, we end up increasingly dependent on a
> small group or single person for our livelihood.
>
> If I were in your position I would spend a lot of time and energy
> focussing your efforts on demonstrating a large developer base with a
> variety of available commercial support possibilities.

On 10/18/06, Alex Pavlovic <alex at taskforce-1.com> wrote:
>
> I would have to concur with Paul here. I don't know about United States,
> but
> here in Canada, there seems to be a growing trend to hire php programmers
> for
> web projects, at least from my experience. In the past we contracted out
> to
> variety of clients, less then 30% were perl jobs, the rest were explicitly
> requested by the client to be LAMP oriented.


I agree this is an important issue. More than just Catalyst, Perl needs
better marketing. I think one big problem is that many people have outdated
views of Perl going back to Perl 4 coding styles. Bill Odom mentioned
finding Perl developers is the number one problem organizations tell him at
this past summer's YAPC::NA. I have cc'd Bill Odom and Andy Lester of TPF as
well as JT Smith of Plain Black / WhyPerl.com on this post because they are
also involved with Perl marketing.

My apologies for the some-what stream-of-consciousness nature of the
following response. It will be formalized as part of the Marketing Plan
after responses are gathered and considered.

(1) Partnerships: Promoting Perl in general is part of TPF's charter so
Catalyst Marketing should work with TPF.

(1.1) WhyPerl.com: TPF and Plain Black (http://www.plainblack.com/ the
company behind WebGUI) are sponsoring a website called WhyPerl.com which
will run articles about Perl. I believe the articles will be business
related on explaining why Perl makes business sense. WhyPerl.com should be
launched in November. I'm not sure what the process for article submission
is yet but ideally members of the Catalyst community would write articles
relating to Catalyst and Perl use in general for that site. If you are a
Perl consultant, writing articles would be a good way to improve your
exposure.

(2) Demonstrating a large developer base: This is a two way street, there
needs to be a group to demonstrate the developer base and there needs to be
a willing developer base.

(2.1) What central marketing organizations can do: Perl not only has a lot
of developers but there are a lot of Perl Monger groups and Perl is the only
language with enough dedication to run non-profit YAPC events. We need to
showcase this information. Catalyst has started this with Planet Catalyst (
http://planet.catalystframework.org/ ) with 14 blog subscriptions. That's
less than Planet Perl but more than Planet Perl 6 and Planet Parrot. Planet
Catalyst also uses and promotes the Perl-based Plagger aggregator. There
maybe additional things we can do in this area to support other Perl
projects.

The number one thing I think Perl can do to demonstrate community activity
is to make an events calendar app like the one that drives the http://www.
php.net homepage. The homepage is a list of events with descriptions and a
side bar chock full of events linking to a calendar style page. There are a
lot of events in the Perl community including YAPCs, PM meetings,
Hackathons, etc. however the perl.org and pm.org pages don't give any
indication of that. My proposal is to make a calendar app like that and then
either run it on a new domain or preferably as the perl.org homepage. I made
this proposal back in August:

http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/08/26/recommendations-for-the-perl-foundation


It would be great if we could find someone to help create this project using
Catalyst in coordination with TPF. I'm not sure but I'm guessing we may be
able to get a TPF grant for this, after all they are sponsoring WhyPerl.com.

(2.2) What developers can do: While the PHP community does not support
non-profit conferences or contribute to their centralized repository (PEAR)
as much, one thing they do well is blog and blog a lot. Perl developers in
general don't seem to blog anywhere near as much as PHP or Rails developers.
The marketing group can only point to things that exist and more blogs about
Perl would be something to point to. If you have a blog and blog about
Catalyst or DBIx::Class, let me know and I'll add you to Planet Catalyst.
One Rails blog I check out is http://www.nubyonrails.com , the Rails related
blog for Geoffrey Grosenbach which is separate from but linked from his
consulting company site http://www.topfunky.com . If you don't have a blog
and want to help Perl, consider starting one. BTW, the reason I started my
own blog back in May was because I didn't think there were enough people
blogging about Catalyst.

The other thing developers can do is Digg and Delicious articles.
Digg/Delicious often. Check out articles that show up on Planet Catalyst and
bookmark anything that seems interesting and others may want to read using
Delicious.

There are other things developers can do like participate in PMs and give
presentations but blogging is the number one thing Perl devs can do to help
Perl. Perl's competition is blogging like there is no tomorrow. Scott Laird,
a core dev for the Typo blog engine even blogs about using SVK. How many
Perl devs blog about SVK? Blogging isn't for everyone but it is one thing
that sets Perl devs apart from PHP and Rails devs (not sure about Java).

(3) Demonstrate Commercial Support Possibilities: We can work on some
central site / directory of vendors that provide commercial support for
Perl. To be successful I think the directory needs to be more than names and
websites. It would be great if consultants marketed themselves (like many
successful consultants do) by articles for WhyPerl.com, blogged, gave
presentations, etc. and then mention their companies in those activities.
For example many articles have an author bio at the bottom of the article
which would be a great place to mention your company. Blog sites can either
be your company site or link to your company site ( e.g. nubyonrails.com <->
topfunky.com).

Catalyst Marketing can help by assisting with idea generation, editing, and
creating portals to point to those resources once they are available.

The best marketing is a combination of centralized marketing working with an
active user community. For example, many marketing-oriented case study
brochures are written by marketing but with data from the users. For more
technical resources, marketing organizations will often create ways to
showcase what their users are doing. One example of this is MySQL's
partnership with Web 2.0 companies. While MySQL has written a couple of
white papers, if you go to their website (
http://www.mysql.com/industry/web/ ) one of the most interesting things is
the case studies written by their users including Flickr, LiveJournal, Mixi,
Technorati, Wikipedia and others. I assembled the presentation list by going
through all their customer pages here:

http://www.dev411.com/blog/2006/10/05/mysql-deployment-presentations

Of that list, LiveJournal and Mixi are running huge sites using Perl.
Ideally those presentations would also be linked from a URI such as
http://www.perl.org/industry/web . I can work with TPF to do this.

Sorry for this long winded response. The jist is that for successful
marketing of Perl to happen in the area of demonstrating Perl developers we
need to following:

(a) More active centralized marketing support: Catalyst Marketing will seek
work with WhyPerl.com and TPF. The goal will be to create vehicles to
highlight what is happening in the community, e.g. planet websites, the
calendar app to highlight Perl community activity, writing and helping get
writers for WhyPerl, a consultant directory.
(b) More active developer community in the area of self-promotion: While
centralized marketing will focus on infrastructure to showcase what the
community is doing, the community needs to provide the content and be active
so as to be seen.

I will collect the responses from this issue and other ones and include them
in the next revision of the Catalyst marketing plan.

-- 
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/
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