Re: Getting some marketing love going..

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

Now I found your mail.  For some reason I didn't see it on evo but it shows 
up on mutt.

On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 09:50:11AM +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> 
> Hi Sri,
> 
> 
> Quoting Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>:
> 
> > Well having been sick, I haven't been able to come through on the
> > calendar stuff as of yet.  :/
> 
> Good to see you back :)

Not quite there yet.  But I'm getting there, thanks. :)

> 
> > I was also thinking of doing some pimping in gnome-love to get more
> > people know about marketing list. That might help a lot in getting some
> > more active participants especially in other countries we want to
> > outreach.  While we want to grow the developer base, we also want to get
> > people who have skills in art, music, and other things.
> 
> Without trying to be negative, what would we get these new people to do? Do we
> have some market research plan that we can put into action now, or are we
> simply deciding which markets are interested in GNOME based on current usage,
> and working on strategies to consolidate those markets?

I'm going to actually try to answer your questions this time. :-)  The
market research plan isn't being done by anyone yet.  John was volunteered
but I haven't heard whether he's started it or not.  But thats definitely
a seperate thread that John can do if he's motivated.  I don't know if any
of us are qualified to figure out how to do one of these things.  

I think we are moving towards deciding what markets might be interesting
for us.  As in my earlier message, targeting the 18-25 crowd might be
a good bet.


> Looking at http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fActionItems - and by the way, I
> want to say that the people who have been feeding the Wiki on this have been
> doing a great job - there are 3 action points there which could be done easily
> by gnome-lovers.

Yeah, it has!  A great job in getting things in order. 

> 
> The first is compiling that list of existing GNOME deployments. I only found out
> last week that there are 400,000 GNOME desktops in Brazil. Success stories like
> that add another angle to the figures thatw ere cited on Linux websites of
> 4/2/1 with 60% KDE, 30% GNOME, 10% others - none of those websites would ever
> be targetting the kinds of markets where GNOME is having its biggest successes
> (JDS in Ireland and China, GNOME in Andalucia, Munich, Brazil and others). This
> should also include a list of local GNOME User Groups or Foundations, I believe
> that there are 5 or 6 of those now.

The GNOME Brazil conference came as a surprise and it's too bad there
was no coordination with us to help out.  One of the reasons why I was
going to send out a note to gnome-love was to at least let people know
that a marketing-list does exist so that they have a place to go.  In
fact we have marketing teams based on region.  (Brazil doesn't have one
incidently)

One thing, I'm going to do is try to contact some of these people at other
regions and work out logistics on marketing.

> The second is GNOME articles - articles about every aspect of GNOME as it
> relates to typical usage would be great.

Yes, the articles are coming.  GNOME Journal will releasing their next
issue on Nov 15th.  If you go to 
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeJournal_2fCurrentArticlesBeingWritten
you'll note the number of articles that are being written.  We are running
into twice the amount of articles that we did last issue.  There are some
being worked on that is not in the queue yet.

The articles do not tend to be about daily usage but highlighting things
that are either coming into the desktop like notification, mime types 
and such or other items.  Id like to move into things like developer 
tutorials if people can take the time to write.  For instance, I've
tried numerous attempts to get Havoc to write an article on libwnck.  

> The third is website updates, but I'm not sure what is involved in that...

The web-hackers guys are working on that.  Not sure what is up with that.
Jeff and Curtis have been doing most of the work on it.
 
> How does that sound?

Sounds good!  

sri