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In the next few months, you'll be seeing a lot more from the IBM Lotus Marketing department. Yes, I did say Lotus and marketing in the same sentence.

One of the complaints that the Lotus community has had for a long time has been the lack of any real marketing voice, or campaign touting Lotus products and capabilities. For years, people using Lotus for their collaboration infrastructure have had to endure management and end users asking about Microsoft products due to their relentless marketing efforts. Well, Lotus is finally about to fight back with its Lotus Knows campaign.

A Catchy Campaign

A couple of weeks ago, Lotus pre-announced the new Lotus Knows marketing campaign to the attendees at IAMLUG, a US-based Lotus User Group meeting. The premise is simple; the campaign will center around what Lotus Knows how to do and do well.

For example, popular business hotels may have door hangers stating "Lotus knows your check-in time." A cab topper around technology convention centers may say "Lotus knows which route the cab should be taking to the airport." Or if you check weather.com for the current conditions in your city, there may be a targeted ad that reads "Lotus knows you'll need an umbrella for your meeting this afternoon."

Going Viral

However simple this sounds, the Lotus community ran with it. You saw a Twitter storm of "Lotus Knows..." posts for days after the announcements. Some of the posts were humorous, while some stuck directly to business-related Lotus messages. The #lotusknows hash tag started showing up, and folks in the Lotus community started adding comments to blog posts, Facebook statuses and more.

This is exactly what Lotus was hoping for when creating the campaign. They wanted the message to be easy to remember, easy to convey, and something that would stick in the minds of users seeing it. And the Lotus Marketing team reached out to the hard-core Lotus users to kick-start the process.

Lotus figures that by energizing the base, they can utilize an "inside-out" approach where they get the Lotus faithful excited, and then move that energy outward into through partners, the installed base of users, and then finally new end-users.

A long-time problem that has plagued Lotus technology advocates is that many users simply think of Lotus Notes as email and calendaring. Now if you've been reading this column for the past couple of years, you know how much more expansive the Lotus Notes and Domino (and companion products) message is. But, for those that don't read columns like this, or the blogs, or planetlotus.org, those users may not know any better. That's where Lotus Knows will really try to help build awareness and excitement around the portfolio.

Crowdsourcing the Message

Lotus isn't just doing this campaign in a vacuum either, they are going to the community and end-users themselves to come up with all of the best things that Lotus Knows. This is being done through an award-winning Lotus Domino-based third party product called Idea Jam.

Idea Jam is a platform to crowdsource ideas. If you've never heard the term crowdsource, Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call."

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