Fw: increasing the reach of fedora-marketing

[Rik van Riel]

Oops, mailman eats messages from non-members, so you guys never
saw Leigh's emails.  This one contains info you did not see in
my replies to her, so I'm forwarding this one through.

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:50:45 -0400
From: Leigh Cantrell Day <lday at redhat.com>
To: Rik van Riel <riel at redhat.com>
Cc: fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: increasing the reach of fedora-marketing


Rik van Riel wrote:
> Over the last few years, we have noticed a few interesting phenomena.
> A lot of new technology was developed in the Fedora community and the
> fedora-marketing community wrote great content about the software.
> 
> However, the main stream press often did not pick up on the fact and
> sometimes ended up with the impression that the technology was
> invented by the first distribution to be loud about it. 
> 
> Worse yet, a while later Fedora (and Red Hat) get labelled "copiers".
> Not only is this frustrating to the developers who implemented the
> software, it is also bad for the image of Fedora and, by extension,
> Red Hat.
> 
> It does not have to be this way.  The fedora-marketing community has
> great content; the Red Hat marketing department has great channels to
> get content distributed and is willing to use those for Fedora.
> 
> I am talking about things like press releases, the press.redhat.com
> blog, Red Hat Magazine (already used by Fedora?) and personal contact
> with journalists.
> 
> In order for Fedora to be able to use those channels, we need to do
> a few things:
> - Figure out exactly what we want.  What kind of press attention do
>   we need most and for what kind of content?
> - For press releases, we need a Fedora tagline (goes at the beginning
>   of a press release) and boilerplate (goes at the end) to act as
>   descriptors for Fedora.
> 
> While we have Leigh's attention, maybe we can start with the excellent
> interview of Dimitris Glezos on Transifex?  It would be a good example
> of great content which deserves to be promoted heavily.
> 
> I do not know much about marketing, so I will close with an
> observation of the news: have you ever seen a "breaking news" article
> that did not have either some cut'n'pasted text from a press release,
> or a lack of details?  Being first with some news on the internet
> means there is little time for research. Afterwards, half the
> internet syndicates that first article, while a few dedicated
> journalists go out of their way to do lots of research.  I believe
> that if we make it easier for the cut'n'paste journalists to publish
> information on Fedora, we will greatly increase the amount of
> publicity Fedora gets.
> 

What would help greatly would be globally planned launches.  Often my 
team learns of new drops too last minute to be able to develop a 
large-scale launch that does not compete with other priorities on the 
calendar.  If we have plenty of advance notice, available spokesppl, 
details, etc.  then we could plan a *global* launch at release time
that includes the following elements:

o press release
o supporting press blogs (we have 200 press/analysts subscribed to our 
press blog)
o industry analyst meetings done in advance of the annct
o global understanding and firm plans by the int'l PR team to act 
simultaneously
o global availability of spokesppl at time annct goes out
o live webcast to discuss launch

For instance, have learned last week that F8 is coming 11/8.  This is 1 
day after a major infrastructure launch.  we are basically competing 
with our own news and press attn.  I suggest we launch to the community 
on 11/8 and do big press (all of the elements mentioned above) to get 
serious exposure + accurate reporting.  It's also Oracleworld 
(11/11-11/15) and press are fiendish for news during this time.

Your thoughts, and support, are appreciated.  Those of us dealing with 
press/analysts also are feeling the void a few have indicated.

leigh


-- 
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan