In the midst of PageOne Public Relations' Chantal Yang's juicy juxtaposition of JBoss and its public relations (non)strategy, I found this comment hugely important:
JBoss always put the community first. Under the open source mantra of "release early, release often," JBoss developers didn't wait for sign off from PR to release code, announce it on community mailing lists, and blog about it. This was initially a major headache for PR...
The PR team initially tried to control this, but communities don't work this way. Traditional PR often focuses on controlling the flow of information when it should focus on the content itself, regardless of whether it is delivered through press releases, interviews, blog posts, podcasts, or presentations. (Emphasis mine)
JBoss' voice worked because it was authentic. Sometimes that came through in JBoss founder Marc Fleury's brash style, but often it was as Yang suggests: content first, process later. Good PR seeks to create a marketing message but also to harness a company's existing messaging.
In my own work, I never ask Alfresco's PR team what I should write about, though sometimes our PR firm likes what I write and tries to build a media outreach campaign based on themes I've already noted in my blog. No matter how many times you think you've said something, most people haven't heard the message yet, so there's always ample room to expand the communication channels, even with the same message.
JBoss worked because the company and its community wrote excellent code and talked about it in authentic, compelling ways. A strong PR team can help to complement this. Just be sure that PR complements, rather than controls, your message.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
(Credit:
Worldtravels.com)
For years I've assumed that Japan is not a big contributor to open source. My first real open source-related job was in embedded Linux, which saw plenty of big electronics OEMs using Linux (e.g., Sony, Matsushita, etc.), but not really doing anything in the way of contributing to open-source software.
It's perhaps time to rethink that notion.
I talked with Jesse Casman and Craig Oda of PageOne PR upon their return from Japan and got a very different picture on the Japanese open-source market. There's Takashi Iwai, for example, currently one of the top-10 contributors to the Linux kernel. And then there's Yukihiro ("Matz") Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language, of course. There's Plat'Home, the company that introduced Linux in Japan in 1993 (yes, 1993!), did a successful IPO in Japan in 2000, and currently ships microservers based on their own mix of Linux and BSD that fit in the palm of your hand. There's Turbolinux and Miracle Linux, as well.
But there's even more, more that I never would have guessed.
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Bruce Lowry, Novell's head of global public relations, will say 'Goodbye' to Novell this week to start with the Skoll Foundation as its communications director. I think the world of Bruce - he is an honorable, wonderful person who was a credit to Novell and will be an exceptional addition to the Skoll Foundation.
I wonder who will replace Bruce to tell Novell's story as credibly and consistently as Bruce did? I have perhaps been unduly harsh on Novell at times; to Bruce's credit, he has always responded in a constructive way that made me rethink my position, not deepen it.
He will be missed in the open-source world. At least his good work will continue at the Skolling Foundation, where he'll help to advance a range of positive social projects. This gets him back to a focus global issues, development, social change, and other things he worked on in his earlier incarnation in the US Foreign Service.
Good luck to you, Bruce. You deserve the best.
I've written about PageOne PR (and its affable yet urbane founder, Lonn Johnston) before. Well, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that recognizes the work Lonn and crew have done for open-source companies (like mine - PageOne is the public relations firm for Alfresco, and also does work for SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Funambol, Atlassian, Black Duck, Cleversafe, Groundwork, Krugle, Linux Foundation, Lumen, MuleSource, Open Logic, Open X-change, Open Solutions Alliance, Sourceforge, and Untangle). Inc. Magazine has honored PageOne PR as one of the fastest-growing companies on the planet.
The reason I mention this is PageOne's reason given to Inc. as to why it's growing so fast: open source.
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