Want to Promote Open Source? Use Rebrandable eBooks
Hoping and wishful thinking work in the Open Source Advocate Fantasy World, but in the real world, just giving away software doesn’t do the job of promoting free products.
On the Internet, it seems that folks are giving away almost everything.
How do Open Source advocates compete in the “Wide World of Giveaways?”
Answer: we use the most effective marketing techniques!
And, on the Internet, one of these techniques is called Viral Marketing.
The Rebrandable eBook Strategy
With a Rebrandable report or Rebrandable eBook Strategy, you put in links to your favorite pages or Websites. Then you embed (or integrate) an incentive (the motivation) for folks that receive your eBook to pass it on to others. (This is what makes the process “Viral.”
For example, if we wrote a report on how to use Mind Mapping Software to teach history, we could insert links to:
This strategy would make it easy for teachers who were interested in Mind Mapping to find Open Source Solutions that would help them in their search for viable teaching strategies.
But, this provides only the Brandable part of a Rebrandable Viral Strategy. (The pass along process stops here.)
To turn the report into a viral Open Source promotion effort, we need to upgrade the process; i.e., taking the Brandable report and making it Rebrandable.
The rebrandable component of this strategy is to allow the people that distribute the report or eBook to change some of the links. For example, a How-To report to parents that described how that same Open Source Mind Mapping software could help students study at home could be “Rebranded” with the teacher’s name and the campus name. Other links could point to district’s Five Year Technology Plan that is being reviewed by the School Board.
Now, instead of one teacher passing the eBook (with its links) to several colleagues, all the teachers on the campus could be…
- Sending the eBook home with their students
- Posting the eBook on their classroom Web pages, Blogs, and Wikis
- Providing cost-free study tools for their students
- Addressing Teacher-Parent / Home School communication goals
Now, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of parents…
- Downloading the Mind Mapping software
- Connecting to the campus (or classroom) Website for more helpful teach-at-home tools
- Talking to their School Board members about why the distict’s IT Department isn’t providing access to the Open Source Mind Mapping for their children at school
The only catch to this rebranding effort is that doing this rebranding by hand is time consuming and tedious. The Rebranding process needs to be automated.
PDF Rebrander software programs are available to change the links within
an eBook. The problem is that someone on campus would have to Rebrand the eBook for dozens or scores of teachers. “saddling” someone with this job would stop the motivation to pass the eBook on in its tracks.
However, there is a Rebrandable eBook strategy that Internet Marketers use to automate the process and Rebrand eBooks. This system is called My Viral Spiral™.
