On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Peter Brown wrote:
> While I truly hope this group, or multiple groups can get together and
> bring him to task for his wrongs, publication of "FlightGear.org as a
> BETTER simulator, which also happens to be FREE, and by the way, that other
> simulator is just a copy of ours that you have to pay for" may be the best
> way to be combative. Go on the offense, publicize the heck out of it.
> Encourage users to post more youtube videos, publish your own, make sure
> every website page has the best language for the google bots to promote
> FlightGear.org as better, with free being a side benefit.
>
> I say this for it seems that marketing is his game, although purely a sham.
> Let's beat him at it, honestly.
>
I wish to second this! FlightGear has never really gone on a marketing
offensive. Marketing takes a lot of time and effort, so it's hard for
people who are developing code or aircraft or working on other aspects of
the project to find a lot of additional time to do marketing on top of
everything else.
Can we do distributed / open-source marketing? What would that look like?
Would we be able to get some volunteers to put some time into a marketing
effort?
Based on my slim experience, I will propose that our biggest bang for the
buck (or for our efforts) would be to get mentioned on popular web sites.
I.e. a release announcement on slashdot or one of the popular flight sim
web sites.
Contacting magazine editors is another thing we could be doing. For
example, last fall I stumbled across "PC PILOT" on the new stand. It's a
great magazine ... full of really cool, realy splashy, screen shots. I
noticed a trend though ... 90-95% of the magazine was dedicated to reviewing
aircraft and scenery add ons for MSFS. If we had time to establish
a relationship with some different magazine editors, I think that would be
beneficial. Again, based on my slim experience, magazine editors want to
sell magazines and advertising, so the more attractive and interesting they
can make their publication, the better. If we can offer some fresh and
interesting content, they might suck that right up and run with it. A
splashy headline on the front of the magazine might be all it takes to get
another person to pick it up and buy a copy ...
Again, based on my slim experience, it seems like whenever we do get a
mention on a prominent web site, our own web traffic spikes, lots of new
visitors come check out our web page for the first time, lots of new users
download FlightGear and try it out. Probably our all time greatest spike
(bigger than slashdot) was when we were mentioned as Kim Kommando's "cool
site of the day."
So in my view, our biggest bang for our effort will be to establish
relationships with the editors of large web sites and popular magazines and
try to get interesting news announcements and content pushed out through
their publications. But there is a reason companies hire full time
marketing folks ... it takes time and energy and effort to establish the
relationships with key people and time and effort to create quality "news"
content to feed them, and then do this on a continual basis so we continue
to look "fresh".
An announcement on slashdot rolls off the end of the page after a day or two
(or a couple hours even.) For a print magazine, once this month is done,
everyone is moving on to next month.
I think our newsletter is a great example of keeping "fresh" information
alive, but we need to take that sort of information and "push" it out to our
different information distribution channels ... and we need to establish
those channels in the first place.
Best regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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