SeaMonkey marketing

Now that the USPTO lists both our trademarks (for the word "SeaMonkey" and our logo) with a current status of "Application has been published for opposition", I started to think of more ways to spread the word about our software and do some SeaMonkey marketing. And you might have seen some results of those thoughts already...

Before mentioning details about that, some short remarks about the trademarks: Even with that status, and about 6 months after the Mozilla Foundation filed the trademark applications, those marks are not officially registered yet but that should happen unless there's some opposition to that. IIRC, even some "Star Trek" figure once said that bureaucracy is a constant in this universe - and as one can easily see here, it also takes time. A lot of time, given the fast life of the software industry.
Due to our request, the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) currently is exploring doing trademark filings for SeaMonkey in Europe and Japan as well. Thanks to Frank Hecker and Gervase Markham from MoFo for helping us so much in this regard.
Also, I want to ensure that those trademarks do not mean that anything in our source base will not be covered by the MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license in the future. MoFo people share our opinion on trademark and copyright being two different things and so we can publish trademarked imagery and names under the tri-license (which only covers copyright).
We're currently in the process of finishing up a trademark policy for using our marks, very much modeled after the ubuntu one.

That leads me to a first real point about SeaMonkey marketing. Once we have that policy up at our project page, we want to put up a good collection of logos and buttons for people to use to link to our project. As trivial as it sounds, this is probably one of our main marketing initiatives - SeaMonkey is a community project, so we need to do community marketing mainly: Our community is not only what makes it possible to keep the project alive, our community is also who needs to spread the word about SeaMonkey.
We need YOU to tell other people about SeaMonkey!

What the SeaMonkey Council can and will do, is to support community members who spread the word with some materials - which need to be made up by other community members though, so we can put them up on our pages, the wiki, or wherever they make sense. If you feel something's missing for community marketing, tell us in m.d.a.seamonkey or even better, create that missing piece yourself and tell us in that newsgroup, so we may be able to put it up somewhere for a greater public and/or improve your creation.

Another way to support people in spreading the word is a SeaMonkey shop with T-shirts, maybe mugs, maybe even other stuff. I'm working on getting such a shop in the next weeks. It will probably be at CafePress, as we can offer more than just T-shirts there and their int'l shipping costs for single T-shirts are better than spreadshirt's. We'll try to not produce income for SeaMonkey with the shop but get that marketing material out to you as cheap as possible - we wouldn't know whom to give any money we earn to anyways, we care much more about having many people to spread the word.

We realize that many people just haven't heard about SeaMonkey. Many users who want an integrated suite might stick to Mozilla suite just because they either don't know about it being a dead project or - even more often - don't know that there's a vibrant project out there which gives them basically the same software, only with a different name and current updates.
This is why getting SeaMonkey onto the suite start page (see my recent blog post) makes sense. Most people who want a browser only have probably migrated to Firefox already, those who want the integrated suite might not know about SeaMonkey though.
We also are looking into getting some word about us out to the press, but as we are backed by MoFo, we need to coordinate such activities with them. This would be no big problem usually, but the suite start page topic has recently stirred some discussions internally there about to what extent they want to actively promote competing projects/products. I'm sure we'll find some solution that works for all sides though and improves choice and innovation on the Internet.

Our primary target audience consists of advanced and professional users and web developers though, and apparently there's a big enough group there who wants an integrated all-in-one solution. We won't reach those through mass marketing though, we mainly need peers in our community to tell them about SeaMonkey.

As I said before: You all need to actively spread the word. Yes, you as a community member are the core of SeaMonkey marketing. Please help us and tell people around you about our project and our great software!

Update (2007-04-04): I stumbled over the correct "Star Trek" cite wrt bureaucracy now: It's Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy who says "The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe" in the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home"