With pressreleases like this...

The Drupal Association has two main goals:

To facilitate the Drupal community
To protect the Drupal community and her assets

Communication and hence promotion is an important part of making sure we get closure to reaching our goals. And for that, we write press releases for important Drupal (community) events, for example the release of Drupal 6.

I am not a big supporter of the idea that the Association has to do payed press-releases, for example pay a news agency like PRNewswire to spread the word. IMHO we should use the power of the community to spread the word, the quality of the product to speak for itself and use mouth to mouth for getting our product out there. I know that the Association is not a community and in fact more "a corporate" but we (the Association) should align with our biggest asset: the community. Not with some press agency; our proprietary friends can do that better and the commercial Drupal shops will as well. In fact some of them have been making lots of waves with the press releases.

But with press releases like this one from Mediacurrent the Drupal Association has a lot less work to do. I quote:

Drupal's powerful taxonomy system, fine grained security, and distributed architecture made it a natural choice to capture the in-depth functionality Carlos was looking for.

and

...the Drupal CMS will now allow Emory administrators to seamlessly update and edit content within their site.

The release looks more pro Drupal then pro Mediacurrent or the site they made.... hold on... there is not even a link towards the site they have been building? And as a logo, they did not use their client's or their own, but have chosen our Druplicon?

So thank you Mediacurrent for choosing Drupal and promoting it. You might as well join our marketing team. Really

BTW: Did anyone else notice that the Pagerank of Drupal.org went down from 9 to 8? Oooh my, the sky is falling.

BTW2: My official function within the Association is now Rabble Rouser, "see" podcast 58 from Lullabot. Thanks Earl! Smiling

Working with the community

Hi, press releases serve an important process of providing a central reference for a distributed community to use when making an announcement.

1)I lead the effort to get a Drupal 6 press release and we got it translated into over a dozen languages. The association paid $300 to a press release distribution agency to help get the announcement distributed. According to Dries, who monitors news services for mentions of Drupal that press release didn't get a lot of pick-up with the press. I am not sure we would use the service again, but I do believe that the community is not yet effective at reaching out to target journalists and industry publications. If anyone has some ideas, I'd like to hear them.

2)I spoke to some people at IBM last year and they encouraged Drupal to come up with a diverse set of Case Studies and Showcases. I've been putting a lot of effort into this. I've been working with a number of Drupal shops to get more case studies and show case announcements on Drupal.org. The community is slowly coming to terms that having a PR Agency posting a press release about a Drupal shop project on Drupal.org is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact we need a lot more to demonstrate the diversity and vibrancy of a healthy Drupal ecosystem.

I think the path forward for Drupal marketing efforts is for local groups and locally focused companies to do regional marketing. But I am not sure we've figured out how to reach technology journalist with major Drupal announcemets.

Kieran Lal
Hard working member of the Drupal association
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.

By Kieran Lal (not verified) at Mon, 19/05/2008 - 8:04pm | reply

press-releases are a necessary evil.

I agree with all that you've said here, but the problem with relying on community to get the word out is that there is a "preaching to the choir" aspect to having community members try to get the word out. For Drupal to gain more traction people outside of our community need to be exposed to it, and the one way to reach those people is to use the existing press-release channels. As much as I hate to admit it, those channels do work.

*rant*And I do hate to admit it. It just seems wrong to me to have to pay someone to put something out over their system. This may have more important years ago when cross country networks were expensive, but where's the open source version of the news wire?*/rant*

By Geoff Butterfield (not verified) at Mon, 19/05/2008 - 9:52pm | reply

open source news

> where's the open source version of the news wire

Being built with Drupal, of course!

News projects in the works and various states of maturity...

http://public-press.org
http://coanews.org
http://spot.us
http://nowpublic.com
http://narcosphere.narconews.com
http://www.openmediaboston.org
http://vineyardvoice.org
http://www.prwatch.org
http://www.placeblogger.com
http://fastcompany.com

I know, nothing here replaces even a PR newswire yet. (Though PR newswires do not seem to have great distribution; a single technology review site listed on Google News would probably do better.) However, these sites and many others (even non-Drupal ones) are the start of an important, diverse, open news ecosystem. Furthermore, some people in it, and others on the sidelines like myself, are very interested in creating the technological infrastructure to scale a fair openness to millions of people-- "democratic moderation" that could allow global conversations, at sustainable volumes, without corporate gatekeepers. One more evil no longer necessary.

benjamin, Agaric Design Collective

By Benjamin Melançon (not verified) at Tue, 20/05/2008 - 8:00am | reply

that's a great list

that's a great list benjamin, thanks - I wasn't aware of all of these but I've always liked Now Public.

By James (not verified) at Wed, 21/05/2008 - 11:16pm | reply

"open source press release"

Well, it's not completely open source but the incbiznet site has a free press release service in addition to their small-medium business networking facilities.

Note well: built in Drupal Eye-wink

By greggles (not verified) at Tue, 20/05/2008 - 1:47am | reply

Could we utilize sites like

Could we utilize sites like Digg more? It seems like there are a ton of both Drupal developers and users that vote for anything Drupal from new release announcements to tutorials to case studies to just about anything. Just a thought. You can take it or leave it.

Also it seems like as more and more professionals go to Drupal we could utilize some of their know-how to get things rolling when a press release needs to go out. This is the same for translating.

By VB6 (not verified) at Sat, 16/08/2008 - 6:32am | reply