Lessons from Eric "The IT Guy" Hendricks

What exactly is the role of marketing in the open source community? In this short episode, I talked about some of the most important takeaways from Eric “The IT Guy” Hendricks’ experiences as a technical marketer at Red Hat. They include:

• Focus on how you make your target audience’s lives better. In the case of RHEL, this means how sysadmins get a better experience, but the focus on how your project improves someone’s life holds no matter what job title you’re focusing on

• Even if you’re speaking to sysadmins, you need to have a story to tell economic buyers — or to make it easier for the sysadmins themselves to make a case for paying for something (support/extra features/managed service), if indeed you’d like them to pay for something at some point

• How open source in general has a marketing problem — too many people are either reluctant to talk about their awesome project, don’t know how to do it effectively and/or don’t prioritize it.

If you want either an open source project or a product (or both!) to be successful, marketing is essential. When done well, it can be incredibly impactful — I think it’s noteworthy that Eric talked about the move from engineering to marketing as a way to have a larger impact and help more people. Marketing is just connecting people in pain to something that will help that pain — at least that’s what marketing is when it’s done right.