[Catalyst-dev] Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft
Zbigniew Lukasiak
zzbbyy at gmail.com
Thu Oct 19 11:06:53 CEST 2006
Just a thought on the blogging part - we have a very active mailing
list and if we just tweak the archives presentation a bit it we could
make a blog out of it instantly.
--
Zbyszek
On 10/19/06, John Wang <johncwang at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 I think one big problem is that many people have outdated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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> Catalyst-dev at lists.rawmode.org
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>
>
>
--
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
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