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?"

Microsoft Usability Studies

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

In a way, this is what Microsoft is doing with their usability studies. I've done quite a few, mainly to get the free software to resell on Ebay (recently got Project (msrp: $400 - $599), sold it the next day for $280 cash).

But other people do these studies because it makes them feel "a part" of such a great software company, and I'm sure they tell all their friends.

Word of Mouth is Difficult Sometimes

[Comatose51]

I've been trying to get my company to take advantage of Open Source solutions but it's not easy. Sometimes it seems that they think if it's free, there must be something wrong with it. I suppose they like the support of paid-for software. My strategy right now is to replace all the non-supported software with open-source ones. Once they feel they can trust open-source software, that when I can seriously push open-source software as an option for our bigger problems and needs.

Re:re

[saitoh]

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.

MySQL

[ayn0r]

A few weeks ago I went to a presentation by Michael "Monty" Widenius from MySQL. Among many interesting things he talked about, he mentioned that MySQL really never have had to advertise in a regular fashion, because most of the time their customers had actually already been using their product for a good while before putting it to use in a commercial project. Some guy in the company would need just any database for use in his small private project, then tried the same database when things started getting bigger...the rest is history.

This model is obviously not applicable everywhere, but it has a great deal of advantages over regular advertising really - the main thing being that the customers actually know what they're getting, by using the product themselves instead of listening to how some marketing guy somewhere decided to describe the product. This is a great advantage for open source projects in general IMHO.