My analysis based on alexa.com rankings is that neither Mambo nor PHPnuke is significantly ahead of XOOPS at this time.

The Marketing and Communications teams seems to be growing more complex all the time.

Obviously, Hercos, Mithrandir and others seem to feel that XOOPS is somehow falling behind our 'competition'.

Why do they feel that way?

How would you define XOOPS as being more successful?

I asked this question at the beginning of this thread and it really has not been answered yet.

Are we wanting to get more installed versions of XOOPS on the web?

Is success having XOOPS mentioned in the press more often?

Some reply's suggest that XOOPS success is determined by how well corporations embrace Xoops.

If we do not define what 'success' is we cannot possible achieve it.

In my opinion, XOOPS success comes down to 1 question:

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How many XOOPS sites are there?

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Thats a real simple metric and here simple is good.

The reason why this is a good metric to focus on is that we can control it to a certain degree.

There should be a direct relationship between the number of unique Visitors to XOOPS and the number of XOOPS sites.

The easiest way to get more XOOPS visitors is to have XOOPS ranked higher in the search engines for the terms.
"content management systems"
"cms"

Is see people talking about creating a list of media contacts. All that is good and may help.


What are we going to tell them?

"We have this CMS system called XOOPS and it's really good. We can do all the same things that Mambo can do."

That won't hurt, but it's not going to differentiate XOOPS from any of the other CMS's.

I've been working on a rough road map that will help XOOPS get more traffic and therefore more installed XOOPS sites.

It's really quite simple, in fact I've already posted part of it.

Simple is almost always better than complex.

I'll post it soon.

We're the last to say that XOOPS isn't as good as mambo or any other CMS! Where did that come from? Since we're so close to the system, we know what we're working on to improve, and we hear most of everyone's needs and complaints, but we have never said that XOOPS isn't good enough. Mambo looks better, but it a b*tch to maintain (and I know).
Theres always room for improvement, so I don't see why improvement is too complicated. Things have been too simple for too long, and that lead to them not being done at all. We now have to deal with it, so why not do it right from the start this time?

Herko

Biglove,

One of the goals of the Marketing & Communications project is to boost XOOPS marketing. On that point, some other CMS organisations have become more active. No matter what our current position is, we need to become more active on that point as well.

We can accomplish a few quick wins probably, yet we definetely need a sound marketing plan for bringing XOOPS to the next level.

Looking forward to your roadmap. It may help us to get things done faster.

Martijn

I did not clearly communicate what I was thinking.
____________________________

We're the last to say that XOOPS isn't as good as mambo or any other CMS! Where did that come from?

_____________________________

I was not implying that XOOPS is falling behind Mambo from a functional point of view. It's that XOOPS is not getting the same type of press than Mambo is.

So, I should have been more clear.

I think that XOOPS is just as good, if not superior, to either PHPNuke and Mambo.

I don't entirely understand why some people don't think XOOPS performs well as a CMS. I'm sure there are some technical differences, but I can't talk about things I don't know about.

My statement that things were being made too complicated was in regards to the marketing approach, not the suggested improvements.

In my last post I was suggesting a common goal that is simple and that would be a good target for the marketing efforts.

So, here is a clarification question:
Would you be satisfied if XOOPS had more installed versions than Mambo or phpNuke or is success going to be defined as something else?

I'm biased toward defining success as more installed sites because I see awards and the press as wonderful benefits and validation for the effort that has gone into Xoops.

At the same time, getting press and winning awards are not things that we can control. We can influence them to some degree, but we cannot control them.

However, getting more installed versions of XOOPS on the internet can be controlled.

If XOOPS shows up higher in the search engines for
"CMS"
"content management system"

Then XOOPS will get more traffic for those search terms.
The more people that find XOOPS when they are searching for "content management system", the more chances XOOPS has to get them to choose XOOPS as their CMS.

The more chances we give people to select Xoops, the more XOOPS sites are installed.


Does that make sense?

Biglove,

Good point, better media exposure and search engine rankings will be helpfull in getting more users.

The question you posted is one of the things that will be discussed as well, as I understood from the main (and huge ) forum post about this topic.

Martijn

"better media exposure and search engine rankings"
As for our XOOPS local community, we do not have better media exposure but we have better search engine ranking.

If you understood Chinese characters, you will find our XOOPS support site https://xoops.org.cn ranks 5th or 6th out of 124,000 mambo keyword search result.

Meanwhile, you can not find mambo's site from 2,410,000 xoops keyword search result.

Back to the topic: writing XOOPS related articles in popular blogs, especially programmer community blogs works a lot. Blog is in some sense a new type of media, not expensive and easy to use.

Here is a really rough marketing road map.

Road map

1. Make changes to default themes so that they provide proper contextual links. ( estimated time < 1 hour )
Why?
The link must contain text so that the Search Engines can determine site relevancy.
The reason that this will work is that XOOPS already has 1000's of sites linking to Xoops.org.
The reason XOOPS is not at the top of the Search Engines right now is that the links we have are not helping search engines determine what XOOPS is about according to the PageRank formula's. ( All SE's are using some variant of the PR algo now. )

By changing the default themes as I suggest, all new installs of XOOPS will have a valuable link. Each new link would make XOOPS appear more relevent to the Search Engines.

That 1 step alone creates the greatest ROI. ( or Return on Effort in this case )

The rest of these are more long term.

2. Change the mylinks modules so that the links actually link directly do the sites.
Currently all the links are redirects so the mylinks modules is not conducive to someone that is trying to get higher SE rankins by getting reciprocal links.

The final part of the road map involves making XOOPS the obvious best choice for anyone creating a new website.

There are few a fundemantal Truths here.:
1. People create websites to share information.
2. People share this information because it give them something that they want.
3. In an ideal world, people select tools because it allows them to accomlish a certain task easier.
4. The power of the Internet comes from cheap distribution and accurate measureability.


So, if you think about your experience creating a website, I'm sure there are certain milestones that you remember:
-building the site
-first visitor
-1st post by someone other than yourself
-1st post from a foreign country
-1st new member

The above list is just a few things that I can remember that made me really happy, however, the common elements is that all these milestones are 'measurements'.



So the strategy that I suggest is to make XOOPS into the best tool on the market to accomplish all these little milestones.

So the strategy involves 2 key elements:

1. Make XOOPS better by making XOOPS the best tool for measuring and tracking.
2. Make XOOPS the best CMS because it's the easiest CMS to make money with.

I think that if these 2 elements were our focus, then XOOPS would be completely different from our competition, so different that we wouldn't even be in competition with them.

So the branding would be, "Xoops, the measurable, money-making CMS."

Everyone else would be just a CMS.

The corporations that I consult with really only care about a few things.

They want a system that is
1. easy to use
2. easy to track results
3. gets new leads or new sales

That's pretty much it. The better we can create a system to let them accomplish their goals, the more XOOPS will dominate our catagory.

I also have a few other ideas that I think will make XOOPS far and above the best choice. However, I want to see what you think about the rough road map first.