Matthew Revell

I’m looking for a passionate, enthusiastic and opinionated person to join the EMEA community team at Basho.

The job title is Technical Evangelist, but it could just as easily have been Developer Advocate or Community Manager.

The person who’ll suit this role knows the open source world inside-out, can quickly grok technical detail and understand use cases and, most importantly, what solutions are a good fit for them.

If this is starting to spark your interest, do the following items describe you?

• UK-based.
• Technical, with the ability to read code and some ability to write code.
• Excited to travel, for one or two days at a time, two or three times a month within Europe and maybe the Middle East and Africa.
• Confident speaking to people at meet-ups and giving talks at conferences.
• Autonomous and full of ideas but able to work to a plan and within a team.
• You understand that marketing is more than being really good at Twitter.

If you’re interested, drop me a mail (mrevell AT basho DOT com) or take a look at our application form.

Today has thrust me into a world for which I was thoroughly unprepared.

At every turn, gaudy intrusions have barked bleak promotional blather into my eyes, as I shudder in the knowledge that my value lies as a point on an Alexa graph.

Following a Firefox 3 beta update, I’ve stumbled – unprepared and blinking – into a world without Adblock Plus. From my employer‘s head office I can see Piccadilly Circus, all flashes and scrambled images. Today, the web has taken on a similar uncomfortable urgency, compelling me to consider breast augmentation, a new mobile phone, life insurance to help my family after the visual onslaught finally destroys my neural paths.

Even that most faux-anti-corporate of organs, The Register, is so determined to force my eyes from their latest rant that I found myself in a new tab watching a flash animation about the latest Ford Mondeo.

And yet I support commercial media. I believe in advertising as a way to fund things I want to enjoy. So, why do I take the apparently hypocritical route of running Google Ads on my own websites and yet blocking adverts on the sites I visit?

Here’s a list:

• Pop-ups: even though true pop-ups have largely gone away, at least from the sites I use, equally intrusive ads are still around.
• Web ads are mostly crap: TV ads in the UK are often both entertaining and creative. Web ads replace creativity with intrusion.
• The ads I run are, for the most part, subtle Google text ads.

I disable AdBlock Plus on sites that I particularly care about and whose advertising respects me. Today, though, has felt as disorienting as putting my head out of the window of an aeroplane. I’m going to leave AdBlock Plus off for a while to experience more of the noise that most people I know now block without a second thought.

Patrick Finch – OpenSolaris marketing chap – has an interesting post about why open source companies need to protect their trademarks.

He touches on something that annoys me almost every day: that a vocal minority of, often ill-informed, people think commercial == bad. I think Patrick has a point in laying part of the blame at Naomi Klein’s door.

Patrick’s main point is that trademarks are an important way for people to know what to expect. He quotes Richard Stallman:

“Trademark law … was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.”

As an aside, Stallman’s next sentence, in the source article, doesn’t make so much sense, to me at least:

“Legislators under the influence of “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.”

I’d like to add one thing to Patrick’s post: a trademark can be revoked if the holder doesn’t defend it (yeah, I’m not a lawyer, etc).

We should expect to see open source companies defending their trademarks. We should judge them on how they defend their trademarks. Linden Labs showed sense of humour when they granted permission to use their Second Life trademarks on the Get a First Life parody site.

As Patrick sums it up:

“Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all”.

Dad’s pants in the middle of his roll, dad’s pants in the middle of his roll.

www.dadspants.com

Vimto rocks.

I’d hate to work for Abbey. Eighteen months ago, they made a bold step in differentiating themselves from the other high street banks.

The agency they employed to carry out the reband said of it:

Wolff Olins has helped Abbey National reinvent itself. From now on, Abbey is no longer just another of the big six British banks – it’s something different: a company whose purpose is to help everyone get on top of money. The new Abbey was launched on 24 September [2003], with the message that “Abbey is turning banking on its head”.

Agency fluff aside, the new Abbey was about making money less scarey, without the faux-chumminess and slight smugness of Egg. This wasn’t just a name/logo change but was carried through in the language the staff used and the products on offer.

Although the “Me and my money” ads were a little creepy – people going about their lives with a miniature version of themselves, which represented their money – the advertising was creative and instantly recognisable. It was fresh, optimistic and rooted in situations that ordinary people could identify with.

Sadly, in the past week or so, Abbey’s controversial new Spanish owner – Banco Santander Centro Hispano (BSCH) – has thrown all of that out. A £3 million advertising campaign has been launched to support possibly the worst re-branding decision I’ve seen by a household name. Forget the Post Office’s change to Consignia, then to Royal Mail, as that had no effect on the bulk of the service’s users; it was a corporate, mainly overseas thing.

This is a move that replaces a contemporary, relevant and differentiating brand with one that makes the old Lloyds Bank look dynamic. Take a look at the Abbey website, you’ll see what I mean. There are no prizes for guessing that both the colourscheme and logo are in fact that of BCSH. The colours, logo and typeface are from another era and, in the words of one of my colleagues, “look like something a small town accountant might think was really groovy in about 1970″.

It all puts me in my place. The Abbey of recent times was about breaking down barriers; the new Abbey branding tells me to think I need them more than they need me. BCSH’s slogan is “Value from ideas” but the only idea I see in this reband is corporate egotism.

The billboard ads that have been designed to launch the rebrand show all the creativity of a bored teenager who’s rushed their GCSE Business Studies homework. Picture it: photo of woman with pensive look, thought bubbles coming out of her head, main bubble reads, “Are you thinking about changing your mortgage?”, or something similar. Man, if I’d suggested that at work I’d be laughed out of the place.

Lord knows how the BCSH branding will be expressed throughout the rest of the bank. If it’s consistent with the logo etc, I really can’t see it working in the UK.

DJ, one of the LugRadio faithful, mentions today’s advert for Firefox, in the New York Times.

Earlier this week, I attended a talk by Jaguar‘s Head of Global Marketing Communications, Laurence Thomas. In it, he described how the company had worked to move the Jaguar brand from being seen as the old man’s favourite, to a credible, premium alternative to BMW, Mercedes, etc.

As Laurence described the substantial efforts his team had employed to effect the change, I began to think about two things we’d discussed during season 2, episode 3 of LugRadio:

• the role of marketing in open source software
• the NHS’s decision to stick with Microsoft.

Aq was very vocal in his opposition to any form of, what he might describe as, corporatism, including marketing, in open source software. Later, when discussing the NHS, Jono said that we had failed – “we” being the open source community.

Aq wants us to find a way, other than marketing, to build and promote open source software. Jono feels the collective pain of a community whose products, and organisation, are experiencing the shortcomings of not employing marketing.

Beautiful, fast software

During his talk about repositioning Jaguar, Laurence Thomas made it clear that changing the perception of a brand does not begin and end with some witty copy in an advert. Instead, the company needs a common goal and philosophy, which then creates the brand

Internally, Jaguar has a statement of purpose, which is intended to inform everything the company does:

Beautiful, fast cars.

Three words which are broad enough not to restrict but specific enough to be a meaningful guide for the company’s actions.

Rather than simply telling the world that Jaguar is different, they have actually changed the company, so that their products, service and communications all live up to a certain set of standards and ideals. The reality informs the brand.

This, my marketing-fearing open source friends, is what marketing is. It’s a management philosophy that evaluates needs and creates solutions to satisfy those needs. To use open source terminology – it’s about scratching itches.

Perhaps it’s useful to see how the marketers themselves describe marketing:

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Chartered Institute of Marketing definition.

In other words, marketing is not just advertising, nor is it dodgy door-to-door selling. Marketing is finding out what people need and giving it to them. The profit you make would normally be financial, but it could be any benefit that is worth more than the effort expended.

It’s reasonable to say that the open source development model already employs marketing methods. The challenge is to get open source proponents and project leaders to realise that marketing isn’t evil; it’s essential.

As Jaguar have shown, marketing isn’t about smoke and mirrors, or trying to fool people. Marketing is about creating a reality which is best for both the organisation and the end user.

I’ll be writing more on this subject, over the next few weeks. I’m sure I’ll raise the ire of some people, but there’s genuinely no need to fear marketing within open source; in fact, to dismiss it is to dismiss much of what already happens.

Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, has described a technique for gaining a one-off, massive rise in traffic to a blog.

He suggests writing a funny post and perhaps adding a picture of a scantily clad woman, so that humorous-link sites, such as Fark or, for British readers, B3ta might pick up on it.

Now, Rick doesn’t claim that this is the path to commercial blog success. However, even if you just want a quick burst in traffic, I recommend avoiding such tactics. I foresee several problems:

• it offers a freak spike in traffic, not sustainable growth
• the visitors you will attract are looking for something funny/someone scantily clad, not the normal content of your site
• you may alienate your core readership.

Of course, Rick would agree that there is only one way to grow a commercial blog: offer well-written, relevant and interesting content that would be difficult to find in that configuration elsewhere.

I believe that traffic, for traffic’s sake, isn’t helpful in building a successful commercial blog.

I admire anyone trying to launch a web design studio, particularly in a small town.

How do you cope with a market that, for the most part, doesn’t understand your business? Then there are some elements of your competition who have equally as poor a grasp and claim to undercut you by hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds?

Argweb, jointly of Stourbridge and Cologne, have come up with a nice scheme to get in the local paper. The post code of their Stourbridge office begins “DY”, for nearby town Dudley. So, they’ve printed a stash of “I love DY” tshirts, in the style of the “I love NY” shirts, and launched a website selling them. Brilliant! Tap into local pride + press the “local story” buttons of the regional press = media coverage and local good will. If they’re lucky, they might even sell the shirts, making back their minimal costs.

The local paper, the Express and Star, has run a story on the shirts, with subtle-enough a sales pitch for Argweb so as not to appear to be full-on advertorial.

I’m pretty sure the journalist had a grin on his face while writing the article:

For instance, while a New York tourist website pompously describes the city as the “capital of the world”, Dudley people for decades have spoken with pride of coming from the Capital of the Black Country.

Cringe-worthy comparisons between Dudley and New York continue but it’s all rounded off with a neat call to action, including the URL of the tshirt website.

Few people are going to take the tshirts seriously but I’m impressed with Argweb’s handling of the local press: they knew exactly which boxes to tick. Unfortunately, Argweb seem to be a little too keen on Flash-based websites. They clearly understand how to create appealing designs but make few concessions to the web as medium.

Anyway, I’ll have to ask my Cologne-based colleague if their local paper has a story on “Ich liebe Kolne” tshirts.