About Open Source Marketing
Open Source Marketing is a project founded by entrepreneur Ben Hunt. Open Source Marketing aims to apply the principles of open-source development to a radical new subject — the marketing process.
The aim of the project is to help businesses, entrepreneurs, and organizations all over the world to survive — or to thrive — by providing the best marketing intelligence available anywhere, free for all to access.
Why Open Source Marketing?
- Nobody can keep up with all the developments in marketing, so to develop a comprehensive guide to marketing means we will need to involve everybody.
- Good marketing is critical to businesses and organizations all over the world, and we believe everyone should have access to the best marketing intelligence, regardless of ability to pay (so we’ve made it totally free).
- By making our models and methods transparent and available freely to everyone, we can all work together to improve our models and methods continually over time.
- The position we’ve taken is that all recorded information should be free.
Open Source Marketing currently comprises three main open-source systems (see below for details)…
- OSM Core (our central marketing approach, which comprises various models and processes).
- OSM Professional Training (for people who wish to use OSM to help their clients).
- OSM Client Service System (a radical new approach to delivering professional marketing campaigns for clients).
Usage & Rights
Everyone is welcome to pick up any of the OSM systems below, and apply them for their own cause, or for clients, free-of-charge.
You may use OSM for profit (including in professional marketing for clients, or for training others) but you may not sell the information itself. Please refer to the Creative Commons license for more details.
1. OSM Core
This system is the central asset of Open Source Marketing, and comprises…
- A Strategy process that can help uncover any organization’s core marketing strategy.
- A step-by-step process for designing complete marketing campaigns, including guidance on which techniques (channels, methods, and tools) are most appropriate for any particular campaign, based on the responses to the Strategy work).
If you want to apply Open Source Marketing for your own business or cause, the OSM Core system is all you need (i.e. DIY market).
However, if you wish to use OSM professionally, check out our other two systems…
2. OSM Professional Training
Not everyone has the time or desire to learn the OSM Core system so they can apply it to their own business or cause.
It is our goal that marketing professionals all over the world adopt Open Source Marketing as central to their practice.
To help make this happen, we are creating a step-by-step training program for “OSM Pros”, which will also be free and open-source.
There will also be an optional (and paid) step for anyone who wishes to get officially certified, and join Ben’s OSM Professionals network.
(Details coming soon.)
3. OSM Client Service System
One of the goals of Open Source Marketing is to give clients a better, fairer alternative to the traditional agency service model.
To this end, we are also working on a radical client service system, which has three aims…
- To boost clients’ trust in professional marketing .
- To share risk more fairly.
- While delivering long-term win-win benefits for clients and professionals.
The key to the OSM Client Service System will be a radically different approach to collaboration and compensation, using revenue-share models instead of fee structures where the client takes all the risk.
