Matthew Revell

Think about town criers:

• They grab attention: loud bell, booming voice, crazy outfit.
• They stick to a script: someone else pays a town crier to deliver news, advertising and so on.
• They’re broadcasters: their message is given indiscriminately to whoever can hear them.
• Their audience is small and local: in fact, it’s limited to the people within earshot.

Before mass-literacy and mobility, they served a useful function. Now that we have mass-media, town criers are inefficient.

Newspapers, radio and websites have wider geographic reach, allow people to develop specialised skills, can be targeted at specific groups.

Town crier marketers often do a great job. They speak with passion, they share common language and experience with their audience, they have authenticity. Word of mouth has long been one of the most powerful forms of marketing promotion and, as we all know, is ever more important now.

To bring the full benefits of marketing to an open source software project, though, we need to make a step forward similar to that from the town criers of old to the mass media of today.

A true marketing orientation allows to us gain:

• Empathy: know who you’re talking with, understand their expectations, desires, needs and world view.
• Specialisation: if your project is lucky enough to have several marketing team members, divide work amongst yourselves according to your skills.
• Targeted reach: blogging isn’t always enough. Find the people that need your software and take your message to them.
• Feedback: marketing isn’t just about promotion. There’s a hell of a lot more. Seek feedback and use that to improve your software and your marketing communication.
• Satisfaction: plan your marketing and it’s easier to see what works and what doesn’t.

Marketing is about matching people’s needs with ways you can help. It’s an attitude of considering what’s most appropriate to the people you’re dealing with and putting that before your own preconceptions.

If you find out what your users need, feed that into your software and consider how to take your message to those users, you’re already hundreds of years ahead of the town crier.

A while back, Patrick Finch tagged me on a “five things you don’t know about me” post. It’s been a while coming but here’s my response.

I ran a Fidonet BBS: From 1993 until 1996, I ran the Socrates BBS, on our family PC. From 9pm to 9am people dialed into the BBS to swap files, get mail and play games. Just about every UK Fidonet-style network was available on Socrates, along with internet email, both of which were pretty rare. I also helped setup an Amiga-realted Fidonet-style network and created then ran the terribly named Ciibernet. I learnt a lot about creating social bonds through ASCII and ANSI text displays, made some good friends and got an excellent grounding that gave me a head start when I got my first dial-up internet account.

I have mild Raynaud’s disease: I’m wearing thermal socks as I type this. Raynaud’s disease leads to a constriction of blood vessels to the hands and feet. Even in warm environs, I usually have very cold hands and feet. When I lived in the (much colder) north east of England, my feet regularly turned entirely white and, sometimes, blue. The cure involved slapping them and bowls of hot water, both of which hurt like hell. I no longer take medication for it and, in my case, it’s no more than an annoyance.

I had a hospital radio show: Again from 1993 until 1996, I had a three hour weekly show on Radio Derwentside, the hospital radio station for Shotley Bridge Hospital, near Consett. Each show was assigned a particular ward from which to collect requests; mine was female geriatric. I ended up playing a lot of Harry Secombe, with a bit of the fabulously named Klaus Wunderlich. It was a great way to learn about radio and to write and perform sketches with my mates. We ended up at Radio Leeds, recording some of our sketches for the same show that Mrs Merton started on. Don’t think our stuff was broadcast, though

I ran a small press publisher: I was a busy teenager. From 1994 until 1998 I ran Poetribe, which published the rather pretentiously named Po?techniciens magazine, put on the Derwentside Poetry Festival, produced a tape of north-eastern English poets and had a few bits on the web. I was frustrated by the establishment arts crowd in the north east of England, who seemed (to the 16 year old me) more interested in fund raising dinner parties than discovering hidden talents. Using my BBS contacts, I found some great writers and think I reached enough people to have made a small difference.

I have strangely jointed wrists: If I place my hands on a table, arms straight, I can rotate my arms independently of my hands. It doesn’t sound much but people often recoil in disgust on the very rare occasions that I demonstrate it

I tag: Rob Annable, Felix Grant, Stuart Langridge, Andi Gladwin and Austen Macrow.

There are five broad types of marketer in the open source world:

• Town criers: shout loudly but not always clearly, don’t listen, make a big noise but actually only reach a tiny number of people.
• Frustrated philosophers: so interested in the academic niceties of marketing that they mostly fail to communicate with anyone.
• Secondary practitioners: they fell into marketing-like practices by doing something else and probably wouldn’t think of what they do as marketing.
• Professional visitors: one of the small but growing group of professional marketers employed by open source software companies, for whom open source is just another job. Further divided into those that engage with the community and those that don’t.
• The people that get it: they know the difference between free software and open source, they’re a part of the community and they know marketing.

I reckon professional visitors and town criers will be the two groups that grow fastest over the next year. Increased commercialisation of open source will feed the professional visitors. Increased interest in open source by non-coders will add to the town criers.

There’s nothing wrong with the people in either group; we just need to help them become the people that get it. We should take the lead by engaging the professional visitors. We should establish a marketing meritocracy and learning path to help the town criers become more effective.

I’m sitting in Shannon airport, overlooking the marsh lands at the edge of the river Shannon, having spent the past few days at SkyCon, in Limerick.

Jono, Stuart and I were here to talk on our various areas of interest, and grabbed the opportunity to record an episode of LugRadio. We interviewed some cool people and the show will be out next Monday, as usual.

My talk was about translating using Launchpad. Ireland is one Europe’s most important centres for localisation and it was astounding just how many people I met that are involved in either software translation or documentation.

On my first day at SkyCon, I met up with Noirin, who works as a technical author and uses Launchpad’s Translations for her work on free software projects. Her enthusiasm for Launchpad was great.

“I love Launchpad,” she told me.

Launchpad’s Translations does exactly what she needs and makes it easy.

Noirin confirmed my belief that we’re on the cusp of a new wave of people in the free software community who aren’t coders but who care about software freedom and can plug many of the skills gaps in the community.

Launchpad works for Noirin because it lets her concentrate on one thing: being a translator. She doesn’t have to care about po files or even know that GetText exists.

We need to find ways that enable non-coders – like me – to get the most from the time they have to spend on software projects. Whether it’s a service/software like Launchpad, or a community like SpreadFirefox, I can’t wait to see how our community is going to make the most of the skills that the rest of the world has to offer.

I’m heading over to Limerick, this weekend, for SkyCon.

It looks as though it’s going to be a really cool event, sharing much the same spirit as LugRadio Live. The programme of speakers is nicely varied, with hardcore FOSS geekery through to talks on the social implications of technology.

I’ll be speaking, on Launchpad, at 11am on Sunday. Jono and Stuart are coming too, so we’ll be covering the whole thing for LugRadio too. Sadly, our bald bald friend can’t make it, so it looks as though we now have a tradition of only three of us attending foreign events.
If you’re in Ireland, or anywhere near an airport that’ll get you to Shannon, scrap your plans for the weekend and get over to Limerick. I’m seriously impressed by how well organised SkyCon has been, from a speaker’s perspective, so I’m sure the actual event’s going to be fantastic.

It’d be great to hook up with anyone that wants to chat about Launchpad and Bazaar. Email/grab me on irc (mrevell in #launchpad) if you want to arrange a particular time.

I moaned, a couple of days ago, about how the NTL:Telewest to Virgin Media rebrand seems to be less about the substance of the brand and more a quick paintjob.

Virgin Enterprises is famous for successfully applying its brand to disparate products and services. While not every product is a roaring success – e.g. Virgin Cola – Branson’s team has previously molded the brand to the relevant segments’ needs and expectations. While Virgin Money is clearly targeted at above average earners 25 – 45, Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic are sufficiently broad not to alienate any of their massive potential customer-bases.

So, it’s a surprise that the Virgin Media brand is so poorly targeted. Visit the website. It’s all 19 year old models in heavy eye make-up, with ridiculous hair-dos and a “look more weird than handsome/pretty” smugness. Since launch, they have thrown in a couple of stock photos of perfect families staring glibly at laptops, but their jarring presence only highlights how poorly the Virgin Media marcomms reflect the incredibly broad range of people whose house is passed by cable.

The worst offences lie in the copy: it patronises the hell out of the reader, its saccharine chumminess is likely to alienate rather than make people think they’ve found a friend and, oddly for a company so keen on ramping up average revenue per customer, it relentlessly makes references that would have been embarrassing in student-targeted ads.

“Hello you…” is how the rebrand announcement greeted existing NTL:Telewest customers. Phone deals talk about calling Aunty Doris in Australia. The website offers to help you “tell your ADSL from your ELBO”; every copywriter has come up with something equally as ridiculous, spent ten minutes trying to convince themselves that it can work, then given up and got back to work.

The problems, I think, are that Virgin Mobile people have no doubt been heavily involved in the rebrand. Virgin Mobile has always been about teenagers, and as a MVNO with no network investment and a saturated market, it’s okay to be that specific. Virgin Media, though, has to squeeze every last penny out of the network that costs billions of pounds to build and resulted in previous incarnations going down the pan.

But this clearly is just old NTL, with some Telewest influence, cracking through a Virgin gloss. The Virgin brand doesn’t yet fit and it shows.

The logo, the copy, the colours are all meant to be evidence of the true brand – i.e. the philosophy that informs everything the company does. Once the NTL:Telewest people start living the Virgin brand (sorry, horrible phrase), then perhaps it’ll come together a little more and, instead of appearing like Virgin by numbers, the company will work out who it’s talking to and what it’s trying to do for them.

My cable company changed its name to Virgin Media, today.

So far, the results appear to be:

• The new brand’s website is a horrible confusion between selling the service and the kind of portal that fuelled the dot-com boom.
• The old telewest.co.uk site doesn’t even redirect, it just times out (which they announced would happen for six days, apparently).
• The Guardian’s media section reports that they’re targeting customers who’ll pay upwards of ?1,000 per year.
• The rebrand has been an excuse to raise prices – e.g. the ?10 per month for 12 months broadband offer for new customers, set to expire on 28.02.07, has mysteriously become a ?14.99 offer.

As a customer, I don’t care; there’s plenty of competition and, despite assertions to the contrary in their annual report, I don’t feel enough loyalty to the Virgin brand that I won’t look elsewhere. In fact, I’d have left two years ago if it wasn’t for their increasingly desperate discounting, each time I rang to cancel.

What I do find interesting, though, is how un-Virgin the rebrand has been. The Virgin brand is crafted to represent quality, value and a sense of mutual “fighting the big guy” fuzziness with the customer. Instead, the same old annoyances remain – the TV EPG is slow, the previously good Telewest customer service has been reduced to NTL’s poor level, the award-winning Virgin Mobile customer service is hard to gauge because their staff are so rarely able to access customer data, there’s no way to know if you have voicemail without dialling 1571 to check, the phone tariffs remind me of the 1980s, and now the, once faultless, broadband service is choppy.

So, should I give them a chance before stamping on the rebrand? No, because then it’s not a rebrand, it’s just a name change, and that would be meaningless.

I hate to talk about bows on turds, because that would be vulgar. And perhaps the big press conference later today will hold some surprises; but I doubt it. The website’s up and the customers have been informed of the various price rises.

Cable in the UK – what a wasted opportunity. I’d love to be proved wrong.

Update: telewest.co.uk does redirect now and it’s the online billing service that’s offline for six days.

The LugRadio Live 2007 venue is booked and we’re now organising everything to make it’s the best yet!

The details:

• Dates: 7 and 8 July 2007.
• Venue: Light House Media Centre, Chubb Building, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1HT.
• Purpose: social gathering of the open source community, with talks, exhibition, BoFs and beer.

We’re organising speakers, exhibitors and all that right now. If you want to speak or exhibit at LugRadio Live, email show AT lugradio DOT org. Tell us:

• Your name and email address.
• Talk title or exhibition stand purpose.
• Short abstract of your talk or description of how LRL visitors will benefit from your stand.
• Type of talk – main stage or lightning – or type of stand – commercial or community (we want to maintain a balance).

We’re looking for talks and exhibitors that people will still remember in a year’s time. That doesn’t mean you have to demo eye candy whilst doing back-flips – although we’d love to have you back Mirco.

The venue this year is by far and away the best yet. Housed in the original home of Chubb lockmakers, The Light House Media Centre features two cinemas, a cafe, a bar and a massive glass-roofed atrium. There’s also a public art gallery, which you’ll be able to enjoy between talks. Importantly, it is right next to the train station.

So, clear that weekend in your diary. We’ll announce the official hotels very soon!

A warning: it appears that my Canonical email address has been spoofed.

If you receive an email that appears to be from me and has an attachment you’re not expecting or that looks dodgy, please delete it.

If you’re unsure, find me on irc – mrevell on irc.freenode.net.