Transfer of Confidence

I learned very early in my career that the key to a successful sales process is:

Transfer of Confidence

Nobody likes feeling foolish. And when purchasing a strategic software solution, people are putting their reputations on the line. So, focusing on making them feel comfortable and confident that they are making the right decision is paramount.

This Transfer of Confidence technique applies much more widely than software sales, however. What is at the heart of the Treasury's rescue package strategy? Transfer of confidence.

To illustrate my point even further...what do you see when you look at the picture below of Barack Obama's first press conference since becoming President Elect?
I see a Transfer of Confidence. Rather than speak at the podium alone, Barack Obama chose to surround himself with his very smart and capable team. His implicit message? The quest for Change will be difficult, but we are not alone in this quest. We will succeed.

Transfer of Confidence is a powerful concept. It is not a gimmick to be toyed with. For it to work properly, you need to use it truthfully and wisely.

Social Web Tip: Start With Passion

In my past two posts, I wrote about two very successful social web communities, the Jeep Community and the Nike+ Community.

What do these communities have in common besides well known and established brands?
PASSION

Just look through all of the pictures and videos posted by the Jeep community to get an idea of how ravenously passionate they are about their Jeeps. Similarly, the Nike+ running community just loves getting together for running events, talking about the latest running gear, etc.

Jeep and Nike are big companies with established brands and healthy, growing communities.

How about we look at an example where the seeds of passion are just being planted?

I recently caught up with a friend of mine who has launched a new site called Greenthumbr:




Bob McWhirter loves gardening and while he has only just started building the Greenthumbr community, the world is definitely full of people who love everything green too. So he has fertile ground upon which to grow a thriving membership.

Passion comes in big and small packages. Moreover, passion can start relatively small, but with the help of the social web, BIG things can happen!

Look at Barack Obama's rise to prominence as a perfect example of how the social web can amplify passion. While some people knew about Barack Obama 18 months ago, his MyBarackObama.com website as well as his Barack Obama Facebook page have attracted and energized millions of active and passionate followers.

So, my social web tip for you is to find the PASSION in your community and feed it, nurture it, encourage it, revel in it, wallow in it. And before long, you just might see the strong roots of a thriving social web community take hold.

Open Source Community and Barack Obama

So you are wondering what Barack Obama and the open source community have to do with eachother? Well I've been catching up on blogland recently and came across a few new posts arguing the definition of open source community and implying the way we do things at JBoss is less pure than it should be. The argument laid out by posts like these actually reminds me of the wave of press focused on the question: Is Obama Black Enough?

"Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," Stanley Crouch recently sniffed in a New York Daily News column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me." "Black, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves," wrote Debra Dickerson on the liberal website Salon. Therefore....Obama is not black enough. Makes logical sense, right? Uhhhh.....I don't think so!

The definition of open source community isn't as singular in nature as some would like you to believe either. Definitions of open source community that focus on one way to do things or one way to interact and communicate are missing the bigger picture. Open source communities extend beyond those who interact directly on the open source projects, mailing lists and forums, and include the users, customers and partners in a wide variety of ways. In my opinion, there are neighborhoods within the larger community that have their own perspectives and ways of interacting with the larger community. So, yes, there is the core open source development neighborhood, but there are also neighborhoods for customers, partners, indirect users, etc. and they are all active community participants in their own ways.

In order to reach out to this bigger community, the Professional Open Source model we use at JBoss enables our developers to spend some of their time delivering services to our customers - via support, training, or consulting. This affords them the ability to interact directly with users who may not be subscribed to the individual project mailing lists, forums, etc. We also have Product Managers, Sales Engineers, Support Engineers, Trainers, and Consultants who spend a lot of time with customers and partners discussing and understanding their technical requirements and funneling that input directly into the open source process. At Red Hat, we spend a lot of time looking for new ways of serving, expanding, and recognizing our community including user conferences, roadshows, Innovation Awards, Red Hat Challenge, client advisory boards, web conferences, face to face meetings, etc.

The definition of open source community need not be so black and white.
Like the software these communities produce, the definition of community needs the chance to evolve and change in ways that we can't even imagine.