Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

This week I saw one of the best customer webinars I have ever seen by Neil Armstrong and Tim Bergeron of Activision Inc.

When you say Activision people think of blockbuster games such as “Call of Duty” , “Guitar Hero” and “Marvel Ultimate Alliance”. For a change when I came home my kids were interested in what I had to say.

One of the things I found fascinating was how Activision had chosen to make the web site a strategic part of their marketing, creating product-oriented micro-sites supported by the company brand, but even more-so by the community of followers of the game. Five of the top twenty five software companies are now games companies and their sites represent the future of the corporate website with great, fresh, engaging, community oriented content.

When you look at these types of sites it interesting to think about “a day in the life” of the content that powers these sites:

1. Create Game Information Behind the Firewall - Create videos, stories, images, ratings etc
2. Review and Approve Behind the Firewall
3. Stage the New Website Behind the Firewall - Content is now ready for the public site
4. Deploy the New Website - Intelligently deploy content to a web server, media streaming server and content management system
5. Publish across Multiple Channels - Use simple templates to provide variety, flexibility and an intuitive user experience
6. Manage Digital Assets and Publish across Multiple Channels - Low-resolution Flash for website, High-resolution Quick Time for downloads, Automatic transformations for mobile devices - iPod, CellPhone, PSP
7. Manage Ratings and Publish to Appropriate Channels - Use rating information to match channels to the appropriate population or age range
8. Make it Scale for Millions of Users - Use load balancing, replication and clustering
9. Use Open Source - Like the leading Web 2.0 sites use Linux, MySQL, Alfresco, Tomcat and JBoss AS

Given all of this what are the benefits

• Dramatically Reduced Ad Spend
• Great successes like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Interestingly today I read an overview of “New report Cautions on Using SharePoint for Public Websites”

Given the strategic importance of this next generation site the world should remember it needs an open source alternative to SharePoint.

Web 2.0 sites have proven that next generation websites are built on open source.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Content Management, Enterprise 2.0, JBoss, Linux, Marketing, MySQL, Open Source, SharePoint, Uncategorized, alfresco, sharepoint alternative, wcm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.