I've really been enjoying Kathy Sierra's blog "Creating Passionate Users" and I can't recommend it highly enough to all of you who are thinking about how to market and promote Plone.  Her recent post "Out-spend vs. Out-inspire the competition" had a deeply insightful comparision table that I'm shamlessly reposting.

Plone, like many mature open-source projects, naturally gravitates towards the "Inspirational" side, and is already doing many of the "Inspirational" behaviors listed below.  But reading Kathy's list definitely made me want to do more to focus on getting Plone's stories out there in a personal, visceral way.   (Which makes me wonder, what's up with Plone.net?)  I think that the Plone Foundation can and should be playing a key role in identifying and celebrating success.

Another point that Kathy makes in this list, and repeatedly throughout her writing, is the importance of providing users with immediate, tangible results.  To me, this is a strong argument in favor of things that make it faster and easier for new Plone site admins to make progress quickly.  Ideas I've heard that might do that include:

• Shipping Plone with more useful Products that are disabled, but can be turned on with a mouse click. 
  
• Pushing as much functionality into the Plone web UI as possible (but preserving the option to transition to filesystem development as you become more sophisticated)
• Contextual Help

I'm sure there are more.

The other item in Kathy's list that really resonated with me was "Help others learn from your up-from-nothing story."  This was exactly what we tried to do with our tutorial on "Nonprofits and Plone" at the Plone Sympoisum this spring -- tell the story of how a few regular blokes at ONE/Northwest are kicking ass with Plone.  I'd certainly like to see more of those stories.