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.

When there is a pure technical innovation/discontinuity customers often don’t understand the technology. So it needs to be explained in industry terms. It’s not a “virtual document” it is a “drug submission.” In “Main Street” everyone knows what the technology does. Therefore there is no need to micro-market to a specific vertical, user and application and pray you will cross the chasm to the riches of the tornado. What is needed is to maximize your “Blue Ocean”.

Alfresco targeted, the “Blue Ocean” of non-ECM users who were “Knowledge Workers” who used a shared drive. The S:/drive population. This is the majority of desktop users and much larger than the traditional ECM market. These users want to collaborate and publish to websites easily using their standard tools.

What is important is to integrate into the environment the knowledge worker lives in on a day-to-day basis to make it easier for them to do their job “better”. This has driven Alfresco to ECM-enable the mass usage tools that knowledge workers use in the Global 2000. This has evolved as follows:

• ECM enable the shared drive
• ECM enable MS-Office
• ECM enable forms and Office for simple website contribution (with Virtualization and Sandboxes)

An audience is a audience is an audience and that audience may be customers, partners, prospects or employees. Enterprises are beginning to realize that a Social Computing Tool is reaching an audience of customers, partners and prospects as much as a website. To drive this we evolved to offer:

• ECM enable publishing to leading Blogs – WordPress and TypePad
• ECM enable publishing to leading Social Networking tools - Facebook

In all of these environments ECM is critical, but must be provided as a service (”Content-as-a-Service”) from the mass usage tool the knowledge worker is using as opposed to a specialist ECM tool that is part of and monolithic ECM suite. As I wrote in my previous post, innovation is focused on ease-of-use making it simple and often transparent for for knowledge workers to get access to ECM. The suite approach stems from the 1990’s when ECM vendors went on a spending spree buying up companies at bargain prices after the .com bubble. This strategy says we have all of the tools you want - they may not be what you use in your daily work, they may not be what you want to use, you may need to get trained on how to use them, they may not be integrated, they may use separate architectures - but hey look at how many tools we have in our suite. We have everything you could possibly ever (read probably never for the majority of users) need.That’s why ECM enabling existing mass usage tools with Content-as-a-service is the way forward.
Kyle McNabb in a very interesting blog wrote:

http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/11/facebook-alfres.html

“And we’re just starting to tap into the persuasive power of content as organizations try to use content, across multiple channels (not just the Web site) to improve the customer experience. And there’s a mountain of content stuck on network file shares that need to be put to use to help improve how information workers get their jobs done more effectively. My contention: You can’t put this content to use if you don’t manage it. You need to manage this content to ensure you’ve got a single source of the truth, that you have the right content ready for use, and that you know where to get it…

But organizations, and information & knowledge management professionals, will want a way to define and enforce how this information gets managed, how it gets retained, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, how it will be used, regardless of where it physically lives — Facebook, Microsoft SharePoint, or on my dreaded C: drive (I can never find anything on it).

The Blue Ocean is being ECM enabled.