Also, might I reccomend the book Made to Stick, which is all about what marketing tactics stick and why. a href=http://www.madetostick.com/http://www.madetostick.com//a It’s quite geeky.
I dunno, I think I lean more towards Bill Hicks’ ideas on marketing:
If you’re in advertising or marketing, kill yourself
a href=http://sennoma.net/main/edits/Hicks.htmlhttp://sennoma.net/main/edits/Hicks.html/a
I have read this one Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, I must comment that you are right at the point.
Dude. You totally lost me… until the DD reference. I once was blind… now I see.
Oh yeah, I just saw Seth Godin speak live at a conference about his new book Tribes. He’s a cool cat.
peace|dewde
The Husband Protocol
http://dewde.com
The heart of marketing is pursuading or influencing, and there are some very basic ways people are influenced that all people should become familiar with. I suggest reading the books of the social psychologist Robert Cialdini as a start. The sleaze in marketing comes from these techniques being used in a harmful or immoral manner and you don’t have to go that route.
Marketing and communication are not the same, with Marketing you are selling something.
Right, but as you yourself said – you’re always selling yourself, no matter what job you take. It doesn’t have to be slimy. If you’re doing cool stuff and good work, let other people know!
The only RPG a real programmer knows is that hideous Report Program Generator language created by IBM. I encourage Jeff Atwood to learn RPG if only to get his take on a truly nasty dungeon in programmer hell.
If you’d written a column saying that you need both marketing ability and programming skills, I think that would probably be true. To claim that the one thing every software developer should know is marketing… no. There are lots of software developers out there who know marketing but have no programming skills. You can read all about them on the Daily WTF. They flim-flam their way through technical interviews with their 15 CHA, then proceed to be a boat anchor on your productivity for the next three years with their 9 INT, until they get promoted and fire you.
Presentation is important, but if you’ve got no skills to back it up, you’re one of Them.
Jeff, that was quite sneaky of you, getting Steve Yegge on your podcast. Now I have to listen to it, and might as well finally check out StackOverflow while I’m at it.
Oh yeah, this is a post about marketing, isn’t it? Like I said, sneaky.
@Greg You’ll find many SAP consultants who are outstanding marketers, but fall up short in the original idea dept.
@Jeff – great article, and I agree 100%
@Tom – I stumbled upon a cool ‘how’: Come up with a great project name.
I was working for a company that did email processing using the IMAP protocol. After some research I found we could do it much better by leveraging the power of that protcol. So I started work, and always referred to my project as Rocket IMAP. Soon the other engineers were referring to it by that name, then management, then marketing and sales started dropping by asking when Rocket IMAP was going to be done. Excite built because of an enticing, cool-sounding name.
The whole experience surprised me, so I tried it again on my next project, and it worked again! It greatly helped my stature in that company too as I became known for cool projects.
What you’re saying is, coders should learn what their users want. No, make that: what their users really can use. That’s the first step, before successful marketing begins. Amazing how poorly Microsoft has been able to do it and get away with it. Don’t get me started on Word. As a writer who makes his living at it, I’m here to tell ya, there hasn’t been a good word processing app for WRITERS since WordStar. The success of Word is due to (a) M$'s marketing hype, and (b) the herd behavior of middle managers. I continue to have faith, though, that a really excellent word processor would grow into its potentially huge niche: those who write and want to do it efficiently. The future of software offers many, many opportunities for this kind of nicheware.
Nine dexterity? You are severely overestimating most programmers agility here.
I get your point, Jeff, but I think some follow-up posts on this topic may be appropriate.
First, you’re correct about marketing yourself; however, a better place to start is honing, and practicing your elevator speech - In the time it takes to ride up a few flights in an elevator, you should be able to introduce who you are, what you do, what you’re doing, and how it will benefit the person you’re talking to, or society at large.
In other words, just a few simple tips might be better than reading dry marketing books. I don’t think, as programmers, we need to go to finishing school just yet. a couple pointers on where the napkin goes, and what fork to use with the salad would be more appropriate.
Working for a big company, I’d say Marketing is not my business. I get paid, whether the app sells or not has no influence on my salary. We have whole departments doing nothing but marketing, it’s their task to make the app sell (tell people why they need it and how great it is) and I like it that way. I like it that I don’t have to think about stuff like this and fully concentrating on making the best app possible. Further I trust them to make the best job possible on pushing the app onto the market.
There is an opposite school of thought that suggests (based on the return on investment) people are better served by honing their strengths than trying to boost a weakness to a mediocre skill.
I don’t agree with either extreme. I think it’s really about AWARENESS of what your ‘character stats’ are, so you can make a concious decision to work on weaknesses or to enhance strengths.
Its not that programmers need to learn how to market themselves – its that nowadays they need to learn how to market as part of building successful applications. Here is a great article making the point, from a VC named Brad Burnham:
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/09/why_the_flow_of.html#comment-2749401
I dunno, it seems to me that Mr. well rounded would be well served to join the party with the INT=51 guy. I converted your analogy to fantasy sports: the genuinely good player with average stats in everything isn’t quite as good as two ok players that are freakishly gifted in one category each. So a team of a freakishly gifted marketer with a freakisly gifted programmer would seem to be the win-win. Or does everyone buy into every man for himself around here?
I’m currently majoring in MIS in college. I was going to start out as a CS major, but I realized that a lot of people are better programmers than I am. MIS combines business and technology in a way so that I don’t become a shut-in programmer and I don’t become a hardcore business person. A little mix of both makes you much more marketable to any business and you gain the skills to learn how to present your ideas to someone that doesn’t have that knowledge (that’s why they hire you!)