Re: Getting marketing-list going again..

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 02:07 -0200, Sebastien Biot wrote:
> Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> > I thought I would (with a little help from Luis) attempt to get 
> > marketing list and see if we can come up with a good strategy to market
> > GNOME to all those people who we KNOW want to use it. :-)
> >
> > Comments, thoughts?
>
> There are so many issues to discuss (target markets and segments, 
> distributions, positioning...) and I have an informed opinion on so few 
> of them that I'll only mention one: promotion.
>
> I was surprised to see how little press we got when 2.8 came out. I 
> could easily blame Ubuntu of course for stealing GNOME's thunder but I 
> won't. ;-) Anyway it got me thinking about how we could more effectively 
> communicate with the world outside the GNOME and FOSS communities.

Yeah, it's unfortunate.  I have a contact at a linux magazine but
attempts to reach him have not proven fruitful.  We were trying to get
one of our article writers for GNOME Journal to write a review for a
real print magazine.  I'll attempt to try again.  It'll be good to get
more reviews especially for "print" magazines as that will give us good
exposure to casual readers.


> I'd like to propose, and I do volunteer for this, the following two 
> tasks to the group. I believe they are essential components to our 
> marketing initiative.

Cool!

> First, we have to get much better at communicating with the press. Since 
> this is at least partially the Foundation's responsibility I think we 
> should support its efforts by creating a press kit and a reviewer's 
> guide. (Liam Quin already suggested the creation of the latter a few 
> months ago). We should make it extremely easy to write and talk about 
> GNOME. Until we figure out more elaborate means to communicate this is 
> probably the most effective way to get started marketing GNOME.

Having press contacts would be a good start.  We might need to talk with
O'Reilly and others.  Attending conferences and what is a good start.  


> Second, we have to better support volunteers representing the project at 
> conferences and trade shows. Here I propose that we inventory and update 
> all our promotional material (pamphlets, presentations, posters, etc.) 
> so as to make it easy for those volunteers to make professional looking 
> material available to the public. I have actually started some of that work.
Gael has written some nice stuff that I used for OSCON.  You might want
to look around Feb-April in the market-list archives.  There is a place
on ftp.gnome.org that has all this.


> I'm glad to see the marketing list revived. There's a lot to do and I'm 
> very much ready to lend a hand. As I stated earlier, I recognize that 
> some of the issues surrounding marketing GNOME are quite complex and 
> while I'll happily join the discussion around those topics, for the time 
> being, I'll be content concentrating on those tasks I outlined.

Indeed, it's going to be fun!

sri