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Open Source Word-of-Mouth Advertising
An anonymous reader writes "Plenty of corporations are willing to hire shills to generate buzz for a new product. But what people don't need to be paid to promote?
Boston company BzzAgent found that their volunteers promote products simply because it makes them feel good. The NYT Magazine interviews several 'agents'. The volunteers cite the feeling of being 'on the inside', like sharing opinions with others, and enjoy feeling altruistic. Has Madison Avenue figured out what open source developers knew all along?"
Alternatively, instead of going for word of mouth you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get, doing your best to sound on topic and/or karma whore in the hopes of getting modded up into visibility. I know I've seen plenty of people trying that strategy around here. Maybe you should give it a go - it might work for you to...
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
This is open-source how?
I didn't know that some company had developed a proprietary speech format that just happened to be good at spreading advertisements. I also didn't know that those of us that are in the OSS community developed our own speech format to be used freely by the masses.
I guess I learn something new everyday.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Anonymity is crucial to any Bzz campaign. If the word gets out that one member of a community is covertly foisting products on the rest, a general sentiment of deceit smites the social atmosphere. I feel that, although this is a perfectly legal, dare I say brilliant, marketing system, I would make it a point to rout out and publicly humiliate any Bzzers I discover.
what you've described and given examples of, is very very similar to what marketing classes call "undercover marketing" (Guerilla and Buzz have both been used for the same concept). The catch with undercover marketing is that you unknowingly are marketed to. Keyword there being unknowingly. If you can pick it up, either you have studied this, or its being done really poorly. There really isnt much if any middle ground there, and the reason is this:
If someone with a thick spanish accent stopped you on the street, and asked you to take a picture of him and his girlfriend. You have never seen this camera, and he shows you how it works so you can take their picture. Its a sweet camera. You take the picture, and your off on your way.
They just pimped a new Sony camera that you'll see next month, yet you were being nice. To pick up on this, either one, you see the example beforehand and wear a tinfoil hat, or two, you dont see it and it doesnt seem like advertising, but just being nice and touristy. That is until you sit across the street in the cafe and watch the preceedings for an hour. This is the classic example I've seen in my classes, and its really hard to pick out without wearing a tinfoil hat and beleaving that everyone is out to get you with advertising.
Personally, that doesnt bother me, cause it doesnt feel like advertising. Thats part of what many people dont like, is that feeling of being sold to. If you can hype a product (which is all this does, if the product sucks, you dont have nearly as much to stand on as tv advertising does), and it is discovered that it was artificial hype, then it goes down in flames faster then the hindenburg, and everyone remembers the bitter taste in their mouths of that betrail, and its *extremely* hard to recover from that. I've seen it go both ways.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
You got that right. Have been a long time Firefox user now, and very happy with it. But shameless call on Mozilla developers and project managers here: get your act together on issues like localization. Take the Dutch translation for example:
A lot of tam-tam was done around nov.9, when Firefox hit final 1.0 release. Parties were organised worldwide, and local Dutch media reported the release.
But in the Netherlands, you'd want a Dutch translation, right? Turns out older 0.9 releases had bad or incomplete translation (so lots of translation work had to be re-done), and catching up for 1.0 wasn't done during 1.0 pre-release period, but mostly started *after* 1.0 final release (sorry, but I think that's braindead project management style). As a result, it took some 3 weeks (!) after 1.0 release, until a quality, 'officially approved' Dutch translation was available (around dec.2). And when it finally was, very little mention of it in local media. But there's more:
As a Dutch user, you'd try some URL's: Firefox.nl (used by some unknown party), Mozilla.nl (fake, nothing to see here) or http://nl.mozilla.org (says "host not found" here). There DO exist several Dutch Mozilla-related sites, like MozBrowser.nl, but no link to be found anywhere on Mozilla.org. Also, it's possible to install English language version, locale-switcher extension and a language pack, to obtain non-English Firefox. But no mention, or links to this, on Mozilla.org site either (or damn near impossible to find).
Okay, I know Mozilla is a large project, but how hard is it for instance, to make <countrycode>.Mozilla.org domains work, point those to country/language-specific sites, and provide some basic info on options, status and downloads for translations there? Mozilla organisation could improve a lot here. For Dutch translation alone: Netherlands have some 16 million people, computer use & broadband is very common here, so huge potential for localized Mozilla builds.
"You think that is air you're breathing?"