The public relations planning behind the launch of the new Acquia website has landed Citigate Cunningham, the firm who orchestrated the campaign, more than 100 media placements, 11 speaking engagements and two awards for Acquia since the project began in January 2008, according to a press release this week published on the web. The Holmes Group has also nominated Citigate Cunningham’s Acquia marketing and promotional campaign for a SABRE Award this year as one of the best new products in the “Business to Business” category on the web.

The article reports that the development team behind Acquia, which includes Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, had concerns about how the open source community would view a commercial Drupal development company and enterprise release of the CMS, and the PR campaign was designed to smooth this over.

“Drupal, a social publishing system with a vibrant, passionate open source community of more than 350,000 members, is the platform for many well-known company and educational institution websites. Acquia was launched with the mission to increase enterprise adoption of Drupal by providing enterprise-level functionality and support to the open source technology.”

“Citigate Cunningham recognized that a successful launch would require the delicate balance of generating substantial buzz around the company and its offerings, while remaining sensitive to the Drupal and open source community’s concerns about how a commercial company would impact the Drupal open source project. The agency leveraged Acquia Co-Founder and CTO Dries Buytaert, the original Drupal creator, as an evangelist, community advocate, and open source celebrity, and designed a three-stage strategic PR approach that would build trust within the Drupal community, drive demand for Acquia in a beta launch, and finally bridge the gap perceived by the enterprise community as part of the general availability launch.”

“To accomplish its goal, the team targeted both social and traditional media outlets including business press, technology trades, Web 2.0 blogs, and influential analysts frequently quoted in the press. Additionally, the agency raised Buytaert’s profile by securing high profile coverage, awards, and speaking engagements that served to seed confidence within the open source ecosystem.”

Citigate Cunningham’s other clients include eTrade, Sprint, Cisco, HCL, OPSource, AliBaba, and other Silicon Valley & international IT firms. According to their site, “In enterprise technology, we have represented some of the biggest software and hardware brands in business applications, security, mobility, telecommunications, semiconductors, systems, IT services and high performance computing. We have also represented some of the coolest consumer tech companies in digital marketing, digital media and entertainment, consumer electronics, social media and eCommerce. Market segments we’ve penetrated include financial services, healthcare, government, education/academia, energy and manufacturing.”

“We’re very proud to have been recognized as a finalist for the SABRE Awards,” said Gary Thompson, chairman of Citigate Cunningham. “Because Acquia offers commercial support for the well-known Drupal open source project, we had a built-in audience for our launch. Our biggest challenge was to reach beyond the Drupal community and expand the reach of the Acquia story into the enterprise market.”

All in all, this can be seen as a pragmatic move by Acquia, contracting an industry leading PR firm to manage the launch of their brand internationally. Many people outside of the PR industry will undoubtedly feel a bit cynical when reading the inside language of public relations strategy, and few really investigate the way these PR firms hype the companies and products that they promote into news stories,”buzz”, and spin that most people take as legitimate news but may be little different in content than a paid corporate “info-mercial”.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see the risk involved in not getting it right at the time of start up (“cuil”), and the fact that everything has gone so well for Acquia since their launch has definitely earned Citigate Cunningham a lot of support & respect. The fact that Acquia has a great product and team to promote has undoubtedly made the process much easier.

Acquia and the Drupal development team have shown great attention to the small details across all aspects of the project that are a symbol of professionalism in open source, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch of Acquia is another example of that. But for most users, “a strategic PR campaign to build trust” and “seed confidence” is only going to work when the PR campaign itself disappears into the background noise.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development. Citigate Cunningham Nominated for 2008 Gold SABRE Award for Acquia Public Relations