Currently we are running the third Release Candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of Drupal. This means that our new release is just around the corner now and while we can’t put a date on when this much anticipated version will ship, it will be within weeks instead of months. So it is a bit late to start coordinating a marketing offensive to go with the release, however, it is never too late to market a product or service. In this thread you can post what you want to contribute to the marketing offensive.

The reference standard

There is one Open Source Software project that rewrote the rules regarding marketing and combining the use of both old and new media to maximize airtime; Mozilla! They have a press department, held a fundraiser for a two-page advocacy ad in the New York Times and have a Drupal powered website SFX to promote Firefox. On this site, numerous of successful campaigns were hosted or promoted; the download counter, the FireFoxFlicks adcontest and lots more, they sure know how to get media attention.

In contrast to Mozilla, our marketing efforts seem to be rather in-side-out instead of out-side-in and primary based around drupal.org instead of using other media. We could however organize a huge media attack combined with the upcoming release to shake things up, thinking out-side-in and combining the power of drupal.org together with other media/sites. In this thread, we try to get brilliant ideas and collect people devoted to act upon those ideas. For coding we have a Drupal saying "Talk is Sliver, Code is Gold". This holds true as well for this marketing offensive, don’t just drop ideas, add as well what you can do to coordinate your idea.

We don’t want to limit you in your creativity to market Drupal, so the listed points below are only examples to get you started.

On Drupal.org

Things you could do on drupal.org are amongst others, write up a press release, coordinate translations of this press release, create a Drupal spotlight banner for 4.7 or man the "press-at-drupal-dot-org" mailbox for questions from the press.

But more than just using our own site, we should use other media to get new people and ideas into Drupal.

Other media

Here is where you can really creative; the sky is the limit as long as you are willing to fly the plane instead of being a passenger. To give you ideas of how we can use the written press, high volume websites, television and other media, here are some ideas to get you started.

Write up a story for digg and get enough people to digg it so it can make the frontpage. Coordinate a "Week of Drupal Adsense" where a Drupal site can run ads from google’s adsense and with the money all these sites make buy targeted ads on google when people search for “CMS”. Create a download counter and manage a referrer program or make a stone with DruplIcon on it and put it at night on the Walk of Fame. Or you might want to make a gallery of famous people wearing Drupal t-shirts or streak at an event that has live international TV coverage wearing nothing but a DrupalIcon to protect your private parts. But then again, maybe you want to do something really shocking.

Step in

So please get involved to generates ideas on how to maximize the marketing effort and state what you will do to make this idea become reality. And you don’t really have to streak if you have a better idea. :-)

Drupal version: Drupal 4.7.x