Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com> wrote:

Sri:

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com

<mailto:Brian Cameron sun com>> wrote:

   - Many public television, radio stations, etc. will play free ads
     for non-profits.  Wouldn't it be interesting to put together some
     advertisements that we could use to get the message out there?
     While it would require some work to coordinate such things, the
     cost would be low once the content was created.  Perhaps we could
     find volunteers to help with creating the content as well.  Some
     people who do graphic design or video work might be interested in
     volunteering their time on a project that would receive a lot of
     airplay and therefore be a boost their resume or portfolio.

We had talked about a GNOME youtube channel I think that is still a good
idea and I'm looking into how to work that in my copious spare time.

As you say, I think this is probably a bigger job than one person could
reasonably do.  Perhaps we should focus on developing the GNOME
Marketing team so that such big jobs can be shared by subgroups of
interested people, as Stormy suggested.

My frustration is that we've been trying to do that for the past couple of years.  It's been difficult.  It might be that it's hard for one person to do but it's precisely why it's good that we start.  Momentum is what we need.  Also developing GNOME marketing requires some kind of plan, end goal and so forth.  I haven't had time to actually develop this as I've been really busy with school and been pretty quiet the past couple of years.  I"m hoping that is at end as I finish up.  But this and gnome journal have been my two biggest areas that I would like to work on.
 

Right now, I think we are in brainstorm mode, but hopefully we can
narrow down these ideas to a reasonable set of things we could do.

We are always brainstorming and it seems to end there.  :-)  We can point out any number of threads with this kind of thing.  It's time to get real and really do something and mean it.  The momentum of doing GJ has really help me move forward on marketing as well.
 

   Although GNOME Journal is a great way to get the message out there,
   can't we do more to try and get the message out in more mainstream
   press?  We are mostly preaching to the choir via GNOME Journal, I
   think.

I think GNOME Journal can still do this.  See the message previously in
this thread regarding sharing articles with other magazines.  If we can
land our articles in mainstream magazines that is going to be a big
win.  Secondly, we have in fact had articles from GNOME Journal
published in foreign language magazines I think in eastern europe if my
memory serves.

That's great news.  Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what we have
done right in the past and see if we can use that information to build
upon such past successes.

Indeed.
 

   For example, I have heard that it costs thousands of dollars to make
   a Windows machine support the sorts of disabled users who get free
   support in GNOME.  Perhaps an interesting marketing angle would be
   to better highlight exactly the cost benefits of using GNOME.  How
   much, exactly, do you save?  This might be of special interest to
   U.S. organizations which need to meet Section 508 requirements of
   the U.S. Disabilities Act.


This is an excellent point.  Also, for developers we have gui testing
tools that cost thousands of dollars in the windows world.  So that's
another thing we can hype up.

Exactly.

   A press team would be great, though I don't think we should limit such
   a team to only think about the GNOME 3.0 roll-out.  There are a lot
   of messages we could be better at communicating.  In the past year, for
   example, GNOME hasn't been very good about participating in things like
   the "Software Freedom Day" and other annual events that would benefit
   from greater participation from the GNOME community.

Only if there is interest.  We already seem to have problems doing
things actionable here.

Yes, that is a significant problem.  Getting more people interested and
engaged in GNOME Marketing is perhaps job #1.

Perhaps we need to build some momentum and get some stuff done.  Maybe we need to just do one thing and build on that success.  But the past couple of years we've seen a stagnation in the non-coding parts of GNOME including gnome-web, gnome-journal, and marketing-list.  If we want to re-invigorate these things we must grow the team and bring in fresh blood.  Most of us are old timers that have been around for a long time.

Outreach is sadly lacking here and we need to shop around.  I have some ideas on how to do that.. that I should enumerate on live.gnome.org.

sri