XSF Marketing Ideas

October 14, 2008

The first XSF board meeting just concluded. Instead of the usual formalities of electing positions, we skipped right into the board’s new hot topic - marketing. With the rising interesting in XMPP, most of the board is keen to invest some effort into promoting our standards, our organization, and our members. I’m pleased to see so much interest in this, and I believe the timing is perfect for the XSF to promote XMPP to a larger audience. How exactly will we accomplish this?

:EXTENDED:

Empower The Membership

The Ubuntu LoCo Teams are great at promoting Ubuntu. The Ubuntu projects empowers them by giving them some simple tools - a wiki, buttons, stickers, and CDs. Another example of such empowerment is the American presidential campaign of Obama. The Obama campaign lets anyone get lists of people to call, helps provide ways for local groups to organize, and distributes basic literature to everyone. The XSF can learn a lot from these efforts.

We already have over 50 XSF members, and they all care about XMPP enough to have nominated themselves for election as a member. I think we should give the members some basic tools to help and encourage them to promote, advocate, and improve XMPP and related standards.

A Few Ideas For Tools

I have a number of ideas floating around in my head, and more were mentioned in today’s meeting. Here’s a short list of them, and why I think they might help.

• Conference calendar - Many of our members, including myself, attend various conferences and events. It would be nice if there was a central calendar that told the world when and where XSF representatives will be and how to contact them. Others who are interested in learning about XMPP can then look at the calendar to see if someone will be at the same event as them. This could also serve as a great place to advertise the various XMPP related talks and presentations done by our membership and by others.
• T-shirts and other goodies - T-shirts make a good incentive for people to become members. They also make for cheap advertising. For those of us who are attending events, it is easy to wear the shirt and field questions from interested parties who pick us out of the crowd. My team at Chesspark has been doing this for years, and we always find ourselves in conversations with interested strangers who saw our shirt.
• Tactical conference attendence - Some conferences overlap enough with the goals of the XSF that it might be beneficial to ensure someone is there to represent us. A recent example of this was BearHugCamp which fortunately was attended by two XSF members and several other XMPP advocates. Perhaps the calendar mentioned above can also be used for this as well, and maybe the XSF can sponsor the interested member by covering all or port of the cost of travel.
• Exclusive accounts - This idea might be a little controversial, but I think it is interesting. Jabber.org XMPP accounts could become a benefit of XSF membership and new account creation could be turned off. All of the old accounts would continue to work as normal, of course, but new accounts would only be granted to XSF members. This would go well with the plan to make jabber.org part of the live web.

Perhaps these kinds of tools will help us grow our membership and leverage it to bring XMPP to more people. If you have any ideas for how we can better market our standards and ourselves please let me know; I’ll take these ideas to next week’s board meeting.