Re: Organizing the Marketing Team

[John Williams <jwilliams gnome org>]

On 11 March 2010 02:59, Paul Cutler <pcutler gnome org> wrote:

We as a team have done a lot of great stuff over the last year and since
I became more active with the team I've tried to help out with
scheduling meetings, a BoF at GUADEC and our first hackfest.  I've never
considered myself a marketer and just tried to help get stuff done.

At the risk of being a whiner or a pedantic academic, I'd like to say something here: you can be a marketer if you want to be.  All you need to keep in mind is this:

"The marketer is the agent of the customer in the firm"

That's all you need to be a marketer.  If you think that "marketing == sales + advertising" this will sound strange to you.  In that case, see Section 2.1 of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

You can "get stuff done" if you have the interests of GNOME's customers at heart, and advocate for those interests to the people who produce GNOME.  The only problem with this is, of course, debate
over who, exactly, GNOME's customers are.

Looking forward, I may have less time to spend than I would hope, and
one suggestion is to form a number of sub-teams focused on specific
tasks and goals, which I think is a great idea as we think about all the
stuff we want to do this year.

Some of the groupings that jump out at me:

* GNOME 3.0 promotion
* GNOME 3.0 video creation /promotion
* Fundraising (Friends of GNOME, GNOME Store, Mobile giving) (Jaap has
done a great job helping Stormy with the Friends of GNOME program from
helping analyze the data to updating the site)
* User Analysis (stolen from John Williams email last month)

 

I'm keen to help with this in any way I can.  I, too, am time poor, but I'll give it a shot.

* GNOME Website (Darton is doing an awesome job revamping content for
the new website)
* GNOME Materials (Conference presentations, brochures, etc)

We are all volunteers and help GNOME in our spare time - who is willing
to help with some of the tasks above?  How would you organize them or
what is missing?  Can you volunteer to lead one of these initiatives?
You'll need to help organize the tasks, find people to help, and each
quarter give a brief (few sentence update) for the quarterly report.