a snapshot of my current marketing work

[Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah panix com>]

(also blogged at http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2011/04/01/1 )

The story of this week, for me and GNOME marketing, is primarily the 
story of a press release. I collected quotes, revised it in response to 
feedback on marketing-list 
[http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2011-March/thread.html#00176 
], added press contacts to our CiviCRM installation and emailed the 
press release to them (at least twenty contacts, with more to come). It 
should show up tomorrow on gnome.org once the "we're delaying six 
months" April Fool's press release runs its course. We're now getting 
responses from interested journalists and I'll be answering their 
questions and helping them set up interviews with some key developers.

Also, I heard a success story [ 
http://www.ereleases.com/testimonials/bbc-news-coverage-slashdot-post-gizmodo/ 
] from another open source marketer about http://www.ereleases.com, so I 
plan on editing the press release down to 500 words and paying $200 (the 
nonprofit rate) for their press release publicity service this afternoon.

By the way, in a previous status report 
[http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2011/03/08/1 ] I mentioned looking 
into Collabtive [ 
http://ask.metafilter.com/180641/Bad-and-good-experiences-with-Collabtive ]. 
It's terrible and I won't put make us use it. For tasks involving 
responding to press contacts, we are using CiviCRM. I will be checking 
with Allan after the hackfest to see whether the remaining tasks would 
benefit from being placed in Bugzilla; I had aimed to do that before I 
fell ill.

This week we also had the second User Day [ 
http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/UserDays ]. I did not publicize it 
as far ahead of time as I wish I had, but we did get some participation 
and answer some users' questions. Thanks to all the hosts: Allan Day, 
Fred Peters, Andre Klapper, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Luis Medinas, 
Florian Mullner, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya.

After a discussion with Sri and Diego, I added "Approaches That Work" to 
the GNOME 3.0 talking points [ 
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/TalkingPoints#Approaches_That_Work 
]. If you need to talk with a skeptic about GNOME 3, we're hoping you 
can get some ideas, tips, and answers to common skepticisms there.

I also did some nagging, editing, writing, and organizing around GNOME 
Journal's GNOME 3 issue, which we hope to put out this weekend [ 
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeJournal/ArticleSubmissionQueue ].

So my main TODOs today, this weekend, and early next week are to follow 
up on press contacts, the ereleases blast, and GNOME Journal. Thanks to 
everyone in Bangalore who's at the hackfest and working on the release!

best,
Sumana Harihareswara
marketing contractor