Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hello Boris, welcome to our interview about open source marketing. Let's start with you telling us about your role at Magnolia.

Boris Kraft: Hi Sandro. Thanks for this opportunity! My role at Magnolia: I'm responsible for various things. One is marketing, which is why we're talking today. I have two other major roles at the moment. One is Magnolia Americas, which is our subsidiary over in the US. A further role is product management, i.e. the development of our future products.

Sandro Groganz: How did you get into open source marketing?

Boris Kraft: That's a tough one! I think I've always been interested in marketing since a very long time, from my first company I've built about twenty years ago, up to today. So it was kind of natural in our company for me to take on this role. We're a small company so it's a very flexible structure, and typically everybody just grabs whatever is out there and makes it ”his“. So, I think it's just a personal interest for most.

Sandro Groganz: What do you enjoy about open source software?

Boris Kraft: As a producer of open source software, I think that the part that I enjoy most is the communication with our community foremost, and the visibility that we gain, and the feedback that we get. There are a brilliant minds out there that by being able to work on the open source software can contribute to what we're doing and that is exciting. I mean, that is really the best part! When I look at stuff that comes in and I say “Wow, that's really cool!”, and then I need to transport this information to our developers and say “Look, what do we do with this?”. This aspect is great!

Sandro Groganz: I have a tough question for you, and that is your definition of “What is open source marketing?”.

Boris Kraft: Yeah, let's see... I think that open source marketing is marketing as it is in general but specialized to the open source channels, if you want. So in the open source area you have specific blogs, specific website that people watch. You also have a different way of communicating, it's just much more open, more transparent, less hype and more content, so I think it's a different mind set about open source marketing than it is in traditional marketing. The channels are slightly different, the content is different - I think that's the main difference to traditional marketing, if you want.

Sandro Groganz: You are in the U.S., in New York, right now we're in Basel, Switzerland, but you're travelling every two weeks as far as I know, and you're building up the Magnolia office in New York. Is there a difference you realized between how to market your open source product in Europe compared to the US?

Boris Kraft: I think there are many differences. The expectations are different in the US, there are all these images we have in our heads about how the US economy works, about how the consumers are, and a lot of that is actually true. It's much more hype, marketing is very very important, and the whole process is very fast, so it's much more hype than substance - that's my experience so far. So, coming from an European country - like Magnolia International sitting in Switzerland - this is a part where we typically have a very thoughtful way of doing things. We like to produce quality, and it takes longer, this is very difficult for us to deal with: To have this “Swiss mind set” and come to the US and basically clash with the “US mind set”. I kind of have to be there and say “we are the best, we are the greatest, we have everything tomorrow” whereas here we would say “yes, well, actually we can do this, yes” - you know, it's a very different perception...

Sandro Groganz: So from what you are saying about differences between the US and Europe, is it that in the US you have to make a good first impression? Is that more important in the US compared to Europe?

Boris Kraft: I think that if you look at the US it's a huge market, that is hard to compare to the European market, because the European market is very fragmented. If we do something in Germany, nobody in France typically would take note of that. Whereas in the US you have the ability to cross-reference anything that you do. At the same time that means there is much more going on than here, because you have the input of everything that's happening all over the US. Which in turn means, that you have to be either focused and specific on what you are transporting as your message, or in any case it has to make a big impact, otherwise simply nobody will notice you.

Sandro Groganz: And as far as I know from my experiences that in the US you have to be at the point very fast telling about the business benefits of your product.

Boris Kraft: I absolutely agree. I mean, that's the easiest way to sell if you want. People want to know what can you do for me, what can this product do for me - and I realized this from my own experience. When I visit a website today, and I can't find out within the first thirty seconds what this provider of this website actually can enable me to do, then I typically leave the website, because I simply don't get their message.

Sandro Groganz: So, I imagine that before you went to the US with Magnolia, you might have been more hesitant to have a “buy” button on your website and show an actual prize. I guess today, this is something you would rather do on your corporate website?

Boris Kraft: We do this actually. Being open source, we always did it. It's part of our open communication. It has two sides: Being upfront just eliminates a lot of problems that otherwise you would have to talk about and clear up later. We're still a small company, we try to be efficient, and one of the things where we can be efficient is information like that. You know, make everything available as much as possible, so people don't call us up and say “Hey, how much do I have to pay?” - they already know it when they call us up, which makes it more efficient. It's great for us.

Sandro Groganz: What are the major trends you see in open source marketing?

Boris Kraft: I think that's a tough one. I wouldn't consider myself to be a trendscout in marketing. If you look at what is happening in general out there today, you see a lot of social network markting going on. I would initially say this is what could be interesting in the future. I have no idea how to deal with it at the moment, how one could use these channels beyond the obvious like setting up your own Magnolia MySpace website or a LinkedIn Magnolia group. But to completely understand this new medium and make use of it in new ways, I don't know yet how that would work.

Sandro Groganz: You recently started a kind of blogging initiative like you started to blog more, so in a way you are also using social media more today.

Boris Kraft: Very true, yes. I mean, blogging for me is already not the future anymore, it's already part of what we've been doing for the past couple of years. I've been having a blog for a couple of years now, and we started a blogging initiative. It's very interesting, because it's very hard to get your developers to actually start blogging, at least some of them - some of our team does a great job. I think that's a challenge to enable that, because everybody's busy all of the time. Developers, they actually want to write code and move the product forward. It's difficult to instill into them a sense for how important it actually is that they share their thoughts in blog form. They do share a lot through mails through wiki pages where we describe concepts at Magnolia, but to distill this into blogs, that's a completely different issue. But true, yes, we're using the blogs as a medium to communicate and I think there's a lot more that we can do. That's definitely interesting!

Sandro Groganz: Where do you think are marketing experts of proprietary software vendors a step ahead of open source marketing experts?

Boris Kraft: Okay, that's a good one. I think it's a little bit a different area where they work in. Typically, they would have many more resources to do their marketing. As we all know, having constraints sets free your imagination, you have more ideas, it sets free your creativity. So I think, as an open source marketing manager, or if you do an open source marketing campaign, yes, you're much more restricted financially, but you're also able to do stuff that might be more fun. So, I think it's actually a good thing!

Sandro Groganz: What's your latest marketing success and how did you achieve it?

Boris Kraft: I would say the latest marketing success is that we relaunched our website, magnolia.info, which we relaunch every one or two years. We used our latest version of Magnolia Enterprise Edition for it and we've done a lot of stuff that we really like on the website. It's more interactive, there are more possibilities for users to interact with us and to provide feedback. From the communication perspective, we've done a lot of great stuff like newsletters there, but the best result of it all was that we actually achieved a ranking of - well, depending on when and where you're look on Google, if you enter “Magnolia” into Google Search, we're definitely in the top ten, sometimes as high as rank #5, which is amazing given the fact the we have about 55 million hits for “magnolia” on the web like movies - you all know the movie “magnolia”. We're very happy about that, I would really consider that being a great success of what we're doing at the moment.

Sandro Groganz: At Magnolia, what's the marketing budget in relation to the overall corporate budget, and where does your money come from? Is it from venture capital, is it money that you earn with your products?

Boris Kraft: You know, there is this old story before we went “commercial” (if you want) with Magnolia, the first three years it was a purely open source product. We believe that by getting donations we'd be able to maintain this momentum. It turned out that within three years of having no commercial model beyond selling support and services, we got exactly $5 in donations. We couldn't quite figure out how to split these $5 between us, which is why the're probably sitting somewhere. The commercial option there means we have a dual license, we have an enterprise edition that we sell, with additional features and additional support options. We have found out that this works very well for us. This also enables us to invest into marketing more than we used to do in the last couple of years. Budgetwise I would say that this is somewhere in the 5% area. It's not a fixed budget, but I'd say it's somewhere there.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you Boris, for the interview!