A couple of recent blog posts by @dalmaer have set me thinking. You can read them here, and here. I know Dion from the two joint O2 Litmus / Palm barcamps we ran, the last of which was in February. You can check a write up of that here. In those posts Dion explores the positioning of developer marketing, should it be advocacy or evangelism? It’s interesting that one of Dion’s ex managers at Google felt advocacy and evangelism added close to zero value. “If you build a great product developers will come” was his opinion. When I reflect on our position at Telefonica, we have some sizable perception issues and reputation challenges to overcome. Many question why we are even bothering with a developer program at all! Of course this isn’t just a Telefonica problem. All the Telco’s are tarred with the same brush. On the whole much of this suspicion is well founded, as Telco’s have a long history of aborted attempts to engage the developer community. Once bitten and all that…. Anyone that has heard me speak over recent months will know we are working hard on the re-launch of Telefonica’s Developer program. I hope we pass Dion’s tests with the new offer: 1)      A Business opportunity 2)      A chance to create something new with unique capabilities 3)      Make it fun and generative I’ll offer Dion the chance to tell us if it does! I did write a piece for Vision Mobile laying out some of areas where I genuinely believe a Telco can add value to developers, but of course the key word is execution. Talk is cheap, so for the Telco industry to begin to successfully address the perception issue, a Telco needs to demonstrate they can break the mould; both in terms of their attitude, and to innovate in the business models they offer to developers. So with this context, how should Telefonica pitch its approach the developer community? I’d love your to hear your thoughts, either here as comments on the blog, or drop me a line via Twitter or LinkedIn and I’ll trade you a free coffee for your thoughts ;-)