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Acqal is an approved TYPO3 agency focusing on support, training and website migration.
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- have completed more than four TYPO3 projects
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Blog Archives
TYPO3, Marketing and the English Language
Submitting your vote...
Sometimes coming up with a blog post topic can be hard, so this week, some odds and ends that are of interest and some things that keep rolling around in my mind.
TYPO3, Marketing and the English Language
I live in the US and use the US version of Google for searching. One thing I did while trying to come up with a blog topic, was run a search for TYPO3 on Google News. Wow, one would have thought I was using news.google.de. Out of the first 5 pages of news results (50 results), only 2 were English (one of them irrelevant as far as TYPO3 is concerned, the other a press release), the rest were mostly German, with a few other languages tossed in, like Russian and Dutch.
This is pretty bad for the English speaking country TYPO3 agencies. A search for Drupal brought up 50 English entries out of 50 results and also revealed something I wasn't aware of, that the White House is now using Drupal for its CMS. Score one for Obama's sense to move to open source, but it should have been TYPO3.
Just for "fun," I decided to take a look at news.yahoo.com search results. With only English selected for the search, I got 5 results, 3 in German and 2 English press releases that were the same.
We have to start generating some marketing buzz in the US for TYPO3. This is a topic talked about frequently, but we never seem to get anywhere. One gets lots of English results with a normal search, but TYPO3 certainly isn't making the news.
A new Firefox Add-on
The irrelevant English result from the news.google.com search was an interesting blog post about a Firefox add-on called "Wappalyzer: Check which apps are powering a particular site." I know I often want to know what applications are powering a web site. Sometimes, its easy to do just by looking at the page or the source, other times, not so easy.
I installed Wappalyzer and checked it out. It identified TYPO3 on the sites I checked it on. It identified Drupal on whitehouse.gov. It identifies tools like mootools and google analytics. Nothing for cnn.com. Prototype framework for the NY Times. You also see a lot of sites with only jquery identified, so there are some limitations. But, still a pretty cool little add-on.
Keywords:
- typo3, wappalyzer, typo3 news, typo3 marketing, google news, yahoo news, drupal, white house, obama, open source
Add comment
* - required fieldYou say it: "We have to start generating some marketing buzz in the US for TYPO3. This is a topic talked about frequently, but we never seem to get anywhere."
So, who is we? I tell you: the US community. And why? All the German buzz is generated by the community itself. Official buzz is in English only. See: there will be four!!!! TYPO3(bar)camps in (small) Germany next year. This is just a little example. How many will there be in the US?
You write "...but we never seem to get anywhere". Just have a look at the European community and learn. Get the idea of "Inspire to share". The somewhat peculiar manner you can find in the US (and was mentioned by Virgil to me in earlier communication about this problem) won't help. Team work will do it. If there is somebody stepping forward, it would help if you offer your help and support to these people in a selfless way. Giving comes always first. T3camps in Germany are usually organized by a number of agencies from the same city (direct competitors!!!) working together to reach a goal.
So this is the time to stop being peculiar and work together.
It is great to see a Bay Area Users Group just being born. Every city, even every town in the US should found a user group! Meet your competitors there and do team work!! Get involved and organize a TYPO3camp in the top areas. There should be some 200 a year in the US if you compare it to little, small Germany's four a year.
Team up --- even with what you still might consider as your competitors. The true competition is not between TYPO3 agencies but with the other agencies. Actually I hear them laughing because you are so busy with competing with yourself that you do not have the time at all to stand up and compete with non TYPO3 agencies ;-).
I am not laughing. It just makes me sad, that you write some five paragraphs about a well known problem without analizing the why and without thinking about a solution.
All the best!
Peter