@FIRST_LIGHT

Today I participated in the Sigma Partners VP of Marketing Summit for their portfolio companies. Roger Krakoff asked Gitti Crowley of HiWired and I to lead a discussion about online marketing best practices. In that discussion, I talked a little about a few marketing tools that we use and/or plan to use at Acquia and agreed to share links to the resources we discussed. Here's the rundown.

Drupal

Not surprisingly, Drupal is the backbone of our web site. It powers our company blogs, all our content management, and our Projects microsite where we get community feedback on product direction. In the future, Drupal will also power our network services platform, all of the community activity we build around our products, and all of our awareness and consideration programs.

Twitter

We have an Acquia Twitter account that we use to keep people up to date on company news, blog posts, what we're working on, and how to find/interact with us at conferences like Web 2.0 Expo. You can set up tools like Twhirl to access Twitter on your desktop, just like an instant messaging client.

Tweetscan

Tweetscan allows us to track what people are saying about us on Twitter. You just do a search and subscribe to the feed. It's a great way to spot opportunities, problems, and threats so you can respond in the moment.

Summize

Summize takes Tweetscan a bit further and offers sentiment analysis on what people are saying on Twitter.

Twist

Twist shows trend charts for Twitter activity on terms of your choosing. It's a great way to visualize online discussion, and you can drop their widget on to a centralized page.

Technorati

We use Technorati to set up custom blog searches and feeds for topics or people we care about. Whenever someone posts a blog entry about these topics, we see it in the feed.

Google Reader

Google Reader is a great online tool for aggregating all the custom feeds from Technorati/Tweetscan, specific blogs we need to follow, etc. There are many other alternatives like Bloglines and Netnewswire as well.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a way to find out relative numbers of people who are searching for your products and brands on Google.

Google News

Google News allows you to set up custom search feeds for traditional media outlets like press releases and the online versions of magazines. If a story hits the wire about something we care about, it shows up immediately in our feed. You can also get alerts via email.

Facebook

We recently created a Facebook page for Acquia. Right now, it's just a way to get our brand out there, but we'll do more with it over time.

YouTube

Everybody knows what YouTube is. We use it to reach the broadest possible audience with our viral videos, realizing that it lacks the video quality and features that Blip.tv offers.

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is an up and coming video sharing site that offers better video quality and the ability to create a nice integrated channel for your videos. Our channel is at http://acquia.blip.tv. It also automatically creates iTunes feeds so people can take your video and audio offline in the car on their iPod.

Slideshare

Slideshare is the YouTube of Powerpoint. We're planning to use it to upload public presentations for online viewing. Just like YouTube, you and your online fans can embed and share your presentations. It helps gets your pitch out there.

Scribd

Scribd is the YouTube of documents. We're using it to distribute print style marketing collateral and printed PR coverage documents that we want to get out there. Same deal as Slideshare.

Loopfuse

We're evaluating Loopfuse as our marketing automation system for visitor tracking, lead segmentation/scoring, and lead nurturing. It's a flexible, open source system built by many of the guys who ran marketing at JBoss, an open source pioneer.