When you build and run a platform inside a large organization, you have to do a lot of marketing, advocacy, and community building/management. It’s just like us vendors have to do! This is totally unexpected by most infrastruture teams and not really in their skill set either.
I want to write an article about this some time soon, but in the team I pulled together a list of the internal marketing and community building platform teams do, especially at large companies.
- Brand names: groups often come up with their own brand name for these platform iniatives: Allstate had CompoZed; the USAF named their Kessel Run; Duke Energy called theirs, I think, Duke Energy IDEA Lab; JP Morgan Chase calls it Gaia.
- I wrote this idea up a little two of my books: a bit in Monolithic Transformation (and a tiny bit in the section “Marketing and training” in Changing Mindsets)
- Their focus is more on community management and practices, but check out the Mercedes people talking about the practical side of this a little bit this talk.
- Here’s my latest overview of it, with some pictures of branding stuff.
- There’s good talk of this from Nadi at JP Morgan Chase, and also some from my collegue Bryan Ross.
This internal marketing and community management is important stuff. It’s also yet another angle on the “platform as a product” concept/name: products need marketing.