[Marketing] Re: [Board] Marketing Costs/Budget in 2009

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 09:33:20AM +1100, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Ari,
> I think you have made an accurate assessment of OSGeo's need to 
> re-target our front-door web pages to be more commercially focused.

For the record, almost all of the email Ari forwarded was written by me:
the original was sent to the board list. 

  http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2008-December/002799.html

> The difficult part which I'm interested to hear your thoughts on are:
> * How are we going to resource a web page cleanup?

To be frank, I don't see anyone within OSGeo who is able to make this
type of revamp happen based on the existing skillsets we have so far
demonstrated. Specifically, I'm not aware of anyone with formal work
experience in a marketing firm that I see regularly taking on website
tasks. 

I've worked in a marketing company long enough to know that I know
nothing, but no long enough to know more.

If I were to take this on as a task, my approach would be to seek out
marketing organizations with web experience, and request that they
provide a suggestion for how to achieve our goals. Of course, our goals
are only written in a single email by one person, which is clearly
insufficient :) Once we have goals -- goals like "Create website content
which does $foo", etc. -- we can more seriously attack the problem, but
I can't say that OSGeo will have the resources to tackle this internally
based on what I've seen so far.

> * What will it cost? (So we can budget for it, and compare ROI from web 
> pages vs presence at conferences)

Again, I'd say that this would be tied to the above -- it would need a
better description/agreement on what needs to be done, followed by an
estimate from an organization familiar with these types of tasks.

> * Are there any metrics we can call upon which compare effectiveness of 
> web marketing vs conference marketing?

I'm not aware of any. However, we do have some experience with
conference marketing -- do we have any metrics for measuring that on its
own?  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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