Re: A cohesive sales message - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Quoting Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>:

> Folks,
>
> IF we could get back on topic for a minute ... not that the discussion of
> copyright infringement isn't interesting, but in the meantime Rob has been
> left hanging.
>
> To quote Peter:
> > Marketing material needs to be made with a specific purpose in mind.  So
> > before you create something, you need to ask yourself who the audience
> > is and who will carry it to that audience.
> >
> > Likely audiences in the near term are guest at expositions and
> > conferences.  Flyers (to pass out) and posters (to decorate) are the
> > obvious types of material for these occasions.  So talk to t
>
> Absolutely.   The posters are easy from a *content* perspective; all it
> requires is a logo & name and our motto ("The world's most advanced Open
> Source database").   Aside from the design, our main challenge is deciding
> how many languages to do posters in.
>
> For flyers & brochures, I see three audiences.   At conventions like OSCON
> and
> PHPCon, we will be talking pretty much exculsively to fellow geeks, and our
> materials should focus on the technical and community benefits of PostgreSQL
>
> in a buzzword-free way.  They should answer the questions "What can I do with
>
> PostgreSQL that I couldn't do otherwise?  What resources exist to help me
> work with PostgreSQL?"
>
> The second audience shows up at conventions like Linuxworld and Macworld ...
>
> the suits.   These people, in my experience, are mostly interested in being
> reassured that they won't be fired for choosing PostgreSQL over MSSQL or
> Oracle.  For them, we'd mostly want testimonials, and buzzword-compliant
> lists of features and comparisons.  These materials should answer the
> question "Is PostgreSQL equal to major proprietary databases?"
>
> The third audience is the press.   Depending on the reporter and the story,
> most of what they want to know can be answered with the materials for either
>
> of the two groups above (more the "suits" than the "geeks").   However, they
>
> will also want the answer to the question "What is PostgreSQL?  Where did it
>
> come from?"  which would include a brief history and an explanation of
> ORDBMS.
>
> Ideally, I'd like to find a way to condense things down to two "packages" --
> a
> "geek" and a "non-geek" package.
>
> Opinions?   Thoughts?  Rude noises?
>
> --
> -Josh Berkus
>  Aglio Database Solutions
>  San Francisco
>
>
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Actually Josh that was pretty on point.  I'm trying to plan an OSS
mini-conference in Philadelphia for later on this year (if I can get it
together) and one of the things me and my staff are going to be doing it putting
together demo's of all the things were going to be talking about.

This might be a little out of the scope of advocacy but I think if we could
agree as a community on what things can and should be be show to impress a
prospective client, I know that would go along way to promote PG and get more
business.

In my experience this OSS vs. Commercial religious war tends to need things that
are "explosive"- for instance, one of the sessions I'm planning on doing is
using Apache and PostgreSQL running on Linux vs. IIS and MS-SQL running on
Windows.  Not only would I cover things like cost of ownership and support
issues but I would actually (literally) pull the plug on both servers and show
the atendess what happens when both restart.  This demo of a "disaster" (i.e. a
power failure) will allow me to showcase the filesystem resiliancy and recovery
techniques for Linux (along with an imaging solution I have) as well has the
resiliancy of PG.

Simply put human being are visual so if you have people in front of you, you're
going to have to "wow" them because that is what they are going to remember.
From there, then they'll remember to even look at the marketing literature and
then hopefully someone will get a call.

This to me play to both geek and non-geek audiences because:

1) the geeks need to know how to do this types of demos
2) the suits need to see it and say, "wow <some other product> can't do that"
3) the press needs to make noise about what the geeks did to make the suit say
   "wow"

Ok, that -$0.25 I think  :)

--
Keith C. Perry, MS E.E.
Director of Networks & Applications
VCSN, Inc.
http://vcsn.com

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