John's Call to Action
John makes a call to action by providing a set of slides to encourage all community participants to drive visibility for the the Yellowverse in their presentation. This strikes me as extremely important, particularly for IBM to do. Product ecologies must be cultivated outside themselves to grow. At the moment, we are far too insular.
John also mentions my observation to him that was inspired by Carl Tyler's comments on his blog. Allow me to elaborate...
If we take as an assumption the figures from IBM about user population and number of orgs using Notes/Domino, there are about 100 million active users and about 45,000 organizations with Domino deployed. If we compare this to the number of participants in certain areas of the Yellowverse, we can see some interesting representations crop up. Let's start with something as simple as the number of active bloggers tracked on Planetlotus.org: 266. If this user population is representative even of the world of Lotus professionals, then each blogger represents about 170 Lotus customers. If we extrapolate that to users, each blogger represents 375,000 users - or basically a customer set the size of IBM itself.
Of course, these numbers are obviously an exaggeration, but look at how they pan out for other groups, too.
| Ideajam.net registrations |
1500
| Each vote at ideajam.net could be representative of 30 organizations or over 66,000 users. |
| Bleedyellow.com registrations |
2450
| Even discounting IBM membership, Bleedyellow users cover about 2100 organizations, or just under 5% of the overall user base. |
| OpenNTF.org registrations |
50000
| There are more users registered at OpenNTF.org than there are companies actively using Domino. |
| Lotususergroup.org registrations |
10000
| (Estimated) I don't know how many unique companies are members, but LUG.org could easily represent over 10% of the user base, certainly enough to be a statistically relevant sampling ground. |
| Lotusphere attendees |
8000
| Only IBM could tell us the number of unique orgs represented at Lotusphere, but a fair guess is probably in the area of 3000-4000. Which translates to Lotusphere being attended by < 10% of the corporate user base. |
What about levels of two-way participation? Lotususergroup.org claims 10000 members, but their online forums rarely break into double-digit post counts on a given topic. If a blog post doesn't appear on edbill.com, it frequently doesn't get more than 5 or 10 responses (a notable exception is birthday/anniversary announcements.) I regularly have blog posts that get over a hundred click-throughs from PL, but only have 5 or 6 comments left on them. Where is the collaboration in our collaborative community?
OpenNTF.org is another, albeit specialized, example. 50,000 user registrations, something in the neighborhood of 100,000 downloads, and guess how many unique code contributors in the history of the site? 650. 650 is a LOT of contributors, honestly -- personally I think that makes OpenNTF.org the largest Domino ISV group in the world -- but it still means that only about 1 in 70 Domino shops have made a code contribution to OpenNTF.org.
What does all this mean? Well, there are a couple of ways to look at it...
1) If the online Yellowverse is a good sample of the general user base, then a fairly small number of voices represents a whole bunch of actual customers.
2) Whether the current Yellowverse is a good sample or not, it's still too small. We need a much broader level of participation to grow the ecology. Most importantly, we need to get away from providing value to Lotus professionals and start creating more value for every day users. Alan's site with handy tips for Notes is the sort of thing that we should all be delivering more broadly (particularly in light of new capabilities like widgets and LiveText!)
3) We should try to keep our levels of participation between each other higher. When we read good posts or good contributions, many of us have a tendency to drop to twitter, IM or email to offer feedback to the author. Don't. Get it in the comments and use Trackbacks, because it's the only way we're get better saturation on search engines.
4) Absolutely everyone should help up the level of visibility of all aspects of the Yellowverse. John's slides are great for sales or LCTY presentations, but they're also useful even for in-house communication. If you're pitching or defending Lotus technologies inside your organization, make sure you highlight the depth of the community as an asset for the platform. It's one thing to hear that Domino has a lot of ISV support as a platform -- it's quite another to be able to browse a list of free, open source packages for the platform and to ask one of the authors for support over an IM session during your presentation.
What other ideas do you have to increasing visibility and leveraging the passionate Yellow community to create more value for customers?
Comments
Posted by Bruce Elgort At 11:43:35 AM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
We all love the platforms IBM\Lotus have build and all the benefits we get from it as clients, consultant, ISV, etc. But that said, I think that relations between IBM\Lotus vs its partner must change.
We're a small IBM business partner and are most often in big organization who use IBM\Lotus products. Since we are the primary contact to these organization, IBM\Lotus Reps should be working with us instead against. I don't put all the blame on IBM, but I think they could initiate this turn-a-round.
Posted by Pierre Lalonde At 12:59:24 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
For sure, the best route is to help the end users and move forward.
Would be nice to see some more internal IBM people blog or reply outside with assistance sometimes, but these guys are busy and so not that surprising.
Posted by Keith Brooks At 01:55:19 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Peter Presnell At 01:56:58 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Ed Maloney At 02:12:46 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Colin Williams At 04:20:54 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |
Other than Alan and Ed's blogs Lotus.com properties have never really promoted community sites such as BleedYellow, IdeaJam, OpenNTF etc.
Posted by Bruce At 06:33:50 PM On 06/16/2008 | - Website - |