Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi Claus, Claus Schwarm wrote: * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. Ahem. The board *shouldn't* do that. Not the same thing. We are a sub-group of the GNOME project. If we have some suggestions for Nautilus, backed up with real user feedback, I am sure we will have more weight than any old Joe Bloggs. We haven't tested the theory yet, though. Activity on mailing lists and bugzilla is the best way to do that. And getting to know the developers involved :) there's not even a way to gain a reputation for making good product suggestions. Unlike wikipedia, GNOME favours credentials over consensus. Gaining a reputation for making good product suggestions will come from (guess what?) making good product suggestions. * There's no way to break to circle: No data - No target (market) - No data - We have lots of data. Every GNOME release, we get data. So far, we've simply had no way to analyse, synthesis and transmit that data to the people who need to get it. This is the most important job the marketing community must do - not talking to people outside GNOME about what's happening inside, but the other way around. Making sure the right people inside GNOME are getting feedback from people who aren't using Bugzilla. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
En/na Dave Neary ha escrit: Activity on mailing lists and bugzilla is the best way to do that. And getting to know the developers involved :) Right, but mailings lists and bugzilla are not the best interface for newcomers. And non mailinglistsandbugzilla channels are not the best interface to deal with GNOME developers. We have a problem of interface and the marketing team is in between (and the webhackers too). Please note that marketing people are possibly even more reluctant to dive into mailing lists and bugzilla. And wikis. People like Santiago may hear from us through rss feeds and planets, and any other web based interface with a proper structure layout, and a reasonable usability. This means we have a structural problem here: in order to get the people that will help us to change/improve our structure and interface we need to change first our structure and interface. Santiago, if you didn't get any proper answer to your questions it was because all the factors exposed now plus a main factor of time and dedication of the marketing team members. Most of us are primarly involved in other parts of the project, we love this corner of GNOME but we spend time and energies when we have them. IMHO the main problems of the marketing team would be solved just by getting more people like you willing to collaborate. We have a problem of human resources as well. :) But... even if you crash here and want to help it's not easy to do so becauste there is a lack of main objectives and strategy. This is the same reason because it's not easy to collaborate even if you are a GNOME insider or even a marketing team regular contributor. Our current objectives and strategy have been mainly individual. Luis thinks this is important and he invests time on it. Dave thinks that is important and does the same. Jeff, Murray, Sri, Quim... add yourself to the list. But... where are the common objectives and strategy? What are the 5 main challenges to be achieved by the merketing team in 2006? We can't even have a version control system to show our progress (were we 6 months ago in 1.2? Are we in 1.3 already or just messing 1.2.4?) As a conclusion, we have a problem of interface, structure, human resources, objectives and strategy. Not bad. :) The good news is that we have a great product: GNOME. Many marketing teams are just in the opposite solution: as a team they are great and well organised but they need to sell crap. I much prefer our situation. If only we would have 2-3 team challenges to achieve, and making explicit they are our priority over the next months. A roadmap, the developers call it. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Dave! Unlike wikipedia, GNOME favours credentials over consensus. Gaining a reputation for making good product suggestions will come from (guess what?) making good product suggestions. Sorry but that was not what I meant. ;-) Of course, a series of 'good' suggestions will gain you a reputation. But the people judgeing about good or bad are the same that made previous decisions. The result will be a perfect product for this particular peer-group. I'm sure there is at least one developer peer-group where every suggestion rules that improves configurability! (You-know-who) :-D In our peer-group, every suggestion reducing configurablity is judged good but is this really true from a marketing point of view? I don't think so. The key is being able to differentiate between good and bad suggestions. This needs a proper research method, and a clearly defined and agreed upon goal. We lack both. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I agree that we have a problem empowering people. People on the list seem to be waiting for direction (from you, me or Luis...). I think both John and Santiago are ideal candidates for developing and leading a strategy of merket analysis - getting information from our target markets, and figuring out how we can communicate with them on a wider scale. But getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. And I think there is a misunderstanding about how much information we have, or an expectation that our information should be in the form of statistics and numbers. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. That's why we've had a clear development consensus around usability and just works and enabling users to reach their goals. Compared to our free-software competition, we are already incredibly focused. I think we also overestimate the value of this targetting: - Ubuntu have very generic emotional marketing materials, yet I think we would like their kind of success. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) We have a bunch of critics of GNOME, and while sometimes they're wrong (!), it mightn't be any harm to somehow communicate their concerns with the appropriate people, and try to get some of those concerns addressed for 2.14. For example, Santiago's mail: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-September/msg00067.html There were criticisms in there of Nautilus, the menu editor, performance and usage of GNOME VFS (without specifics, it has to be said). Did those ever get sent back to the Nautilus developers? How about a proposal to include SMEG in 2.14? OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not, as long as this mailing list remains as poorly informed about the user experience as the average slashdot commenter. Marketing comes in 5 stages - 1. action, 2. communication, 3. information retrieval, 4. reaction, 5. communication, 6. goto 3 How good is our feedback loop? What Santiago is saying, if I understand correctly, is that right now we don't seem to have one, and one would be nice. Yes. But a) what are the suggestions, and b) should we wait for one. If we don't plan to target these people differently, then there isn't much point in targetting them separately. We do, though. Example: Target: Windows hobbyists - Help get copies of WinLibre or the OpenCd on magazine covers - Hand out copies of same at conferences, alongside LiveCDs (there's a reason Ubuntu is putting windows software on their LiveCDs). - Make the Windows binaries easier to find download (look at www.gimp.org for an example of hard to find Windows binaries - comare contrast with getfirefox.org) - If a bunch of projects have Windows ports, how about centralising everything for downloads? Have static links, help people avoid the user nightmare that is Sourceforge downloads. Yes, this would be nice. Target: Distros - Email advisory board members regularly, just to keep in contact - Find out who the decision makers for distros are - Use the phone - Make sure feedback gets back to relevant developers I have personally failed at this utterly. It would be very nice. There are few enough distros that the correct way to market to them is to be available, and listen. Target: Third party developers - Improve API docs - Provide a third party application developers guide - Listen to Bugzilla, mailing lists - Keep in contact with people who are having problems, and put people having similar problems in contact to see if they can't solve the problem themselves, together - Poke a developer now again about outstanding problems to see if anything's happened People should feel free to exert pressure, but I think the marketing-list would fail utterly if it expected to get this involved in the little details of development. There's enough pressure to get these things right from within the development community anyway, and telling people that you _really_ want them to do something doesn't really make it happen. Target: Public administrators - Go to your local town hall ask to speak to the head of IT - Go to the website of your local town hall/region/county/state, and try to work out who the head of IT is - Use the phone - Figure out which conferences are important to local government decision makers, and make sure there's a GNOME presence there - Make sure feedback gets back to relevant developers Target: Momentum
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Should we be doing DesktopUseCases to help us along ? I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Ahoy, On Tuesday 06 December 2005 11:44, Murray Cumming wrote: Should we be doing DesktopUseCases to help us along ? I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.ht ml I thought you all might be interested in some work that a new KDE promo volunteer is doing on market segmentation: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-promom=113384904704134w=2 Kind regards, Tom -- I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, please e-mail me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 12:24 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: There were criticisms in there of Nautilus, the menu editor, performance and usage of GNOME VFS (without specifics, it has to be said). Did those ever get sent back to the Nautilus developers? How about a proposal to include SMEG in 2.14? OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not, as long as this mailing list remains as poorly informed about the user experience as the average slashdot commenter. As an outsider butting in :o), I would say it does, and being poorly informed probably helps this list more than it hinders it. I'm not sure what model most people have of marketing (in terms of, how does it actually work, and how do you seek to achieve things using it?), but for me the idea is that you're trying to get someone to draw a conclusion or make a decision based on the materials/information you give them - usually, a decision to buy (which may not be the case here). The most convincing argument you usually hear is the one you make to yourself. Now, you aren't able to do that by arguing the toss with someone: the customer is always right, no matter what the circumstance. If people don't like Nautilus, they're right, whether you agree or not. The goal of marketing wrt. Nautilus, then, might be to tell people about the cool stuff it does, so that they can draw different conclusions (and if they don't, well, that tells you something ;) This is similar to your organic food producer: going around telling people that they are slowly poisoning themselves and what they're eating is wrong is unlikely to win sales; telling people that organic food is totally natural and selling the lifestyle to them, on the other hand, seems to work wonders - in the UK, the market for organic food has grown 1000% over the last decade (confirming, in part, that choice of lifestyle is one of the largest factors in modern marketing: people have an ideal about how they live, and purchase products which match that ideal). So, going back to marketing, selling people on usability is more than You're wrong, and here's my study which proves it - most people wouldn't be convinced by that, and is a reason I think Microsoft's TCO advertising fails miserably (in contrast to their rather good WXP TV advertising). But, usability is a big feature of GNOME, and is surely relevant to all the sectors any marketing strategy would attempt to target. It has to be possible to market that in a way that doesn't say We do this better than you. And also, before I relurk again, I would suggest not trying to do too much too soon - i.e., start small. Personally, I would attempt to hit developers: getting people enthused about the GNOME platform to build cool stuff for it. Developers build demand, users drive it IMHO - MS have been fantastic at that in the past. Beagle, dashboard, F-spot, that kind of app already generates buzz and excitement. There are surely some quick wins there. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. Momentum is important, I agree. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. Sure we do, in general. And we're making good software, in general. And yet, there are a bunch of points which have come up repeatedly as annoyances (and thus a usability issue) in GNOME reviews and articles - having a preference in Nautilus to change to the browser view, having Nautilus places and GTK+ bookmarks be shared, etc. I don't know what progress (if any) is being made on some of these things. I don't know if they're considered priority items at this stage. I think we also overestimate the value of this targetting: - Ubuntu have very generic emotional marketing materials, yet I think we would like their kind of success. Ubuntu targetted momentum users early, and are reaping rewards. - Use Debian, and get developer buy-in from the Debian community - Use GNOME, and get developer buy-in from GNOME community - Hire community leaders from both as advocates They've also directly targetted hardware vendors - their hardware database, and contracts with HP and others to certify hardware, will make them a good choice for pre-install on OEM desktops and laptops. When that happens, it won't have been by accident. To consider Ubuntu's marketing as unfocussed would be wrong. They woprked very hard early on to get community involvement, and in effect turned the Debian and GNOME projects into their marketing department. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) Have you forgotten that Firefox/Mozilla was an early-adopter fringe product for years before jumping the chasm? And by conventional marketing wisdom, with 10% market share they still haven't crossed the chasm (although I think it's fair to say that they have). When 1.0 came out, spreadfirefox.org was instrumental in their momentum. Again, their improvements have been entirely early-adopter/community driven. They got the cutting edge on board, and those guys helped them jump up in market share. And Mozilla has not *just* been marketing that way - they also have a classical marketing department, looking for big corporate support contracts, sending sales reps out to see what the big customers need, and making sure that Firefox gives it to them. OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not I agree. But perhaps feedback from us will change the priority of a change up the chain? Spatial's great, I love it, it took me a while to get used to it. But there's a reason Ubuntu changed it. Yes. But a) what are the suggestions, and b) should we wait for one. a) I made a bunch. Anyone interested in taking on part of that project please contact me, or mail on-list. b) No. Marketing strategies can be developed in parallel, and we can certainly do some general communication promotion without addressing the needs of specific market segments. People should feel free to exert pressure, but I think the marketing-list would fail utterly if it expected to get this involved in the little details of development. There's enough pressure to get these things right from within the development community anyway, and telling people that you _really_ want them to do something doesn't really make it happen. I see all of this more as an organic, person to person thing. Here's a scenario. 1. Article gets published by someone giving out about GNOME. 2. Someone mails author asking him about specifics for a given problem 3. The someone creates a few Bugzilla entries, or adds comments in relevant bugzillas 4. The someone gets on to a developer in the project being given out about, perhaps on IRC, perhaps by mail. Just to say hi, tell him about the comments, maybe point to the bugzilla, and ask him what he thinks. 5. The developer thinks the concerns are irrelevant, and explains why - Mail author back 6. The developer agrees that thing X is a pain - Ask if it's planned during the next devel cycle. 7. If it is, tell author. If it isn't, ask for it to be. Or maybe contact the board ask them to put up a bounty for feature X. Or maybe try it yourself. 8. A month later, another article gives out about the same thing. Mail the author, add comments to bugzilla, touch base with the dev eloper (Hi, thought you might be interested in this article: the guy really wants the frobniz fixed - same complaint we got from (previous author) - has anyone shown interest in fixing
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. Momentum is important, I agree. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. Sure we do, in general. And we're making good software, in general. And yet, there are a bunch of points which have come up repeatedly as annoyances (and thus a usability issue) in GNOME reviews and articles - having a preference in Nautilus to change to the browser view, having Nautilus places and GTK+ bookmarks be shared, etc. I don't know what progress (if any) is being made on some of these things. I don't know if they're considered priority items at this stage. They are done. They were done as quickly as possible. To consider Ubuntu's marketing as unfocussed would be wrong. They woprked very hard early on to get community involvement, and in effect turned the Debian and GNOME projects into their marketing department. They went totally against the grain of most debian development, thankfully. Just because they used what they had doesn't mean that their developers were their target users. But we're splitting hairs here, I suppose. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) Have you forgotten that Firefox/Mozilla was an early-adopter fringe product for years before jumping the chasm? Everything has to start somewhere. We have early adopters (and users too). What's next? [snip] I have zero way to get the information that people seem to be asking for before they'll get moving on marketing What information do people seem to be asking for? And who is the they? The several people on this thread who are basically saying Stop, this is not the best way. I'll hold off for another month in case people suddenly come up with some strategy for getting this information or moving on without it. If not, I'll try again to get things moving anyway. No, don't hold off, carry on. Bring the slogan idea to a head, though - we should pick some, and be done with it. I'd prefer to push that when people can support it. If nothing improves after a month then it should be easier to support. Really, the slogan is not very interesting - it's just good to have one. I'm far more interested in a simple emotional campaign that let's people show their support and feel good about doing it. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
hi again, and thanks to all for replying. i'll try to answer some of your comments, at least from my point of view. The selling/advertising does not stop you from doing marketing. Should we stop going to trade fairs, close down our website, and stop announcing releases while we wait for the traditional marketing to reach step one? it's not me, it's us. we are supposed to be a marketing team, so we're supposed to be focused in pretty much the same direction (not 100% the same, but at least the basics). that's why i'm trying to gather some consensus, instead of starting yet another individual uncoordinated effort. and no i'm not suggesting let's not advertise, but let's not put the focus in advertising. imho we can't put our focus in advertising until we agree on the basics: what our target market is, what they want, what we have to offer to them, and what we can do to fix those things they want. The target market discussion is another one which we've had at least 3 times. I'm pretty clear on what our target markets should be: ok you're pretty clear on that, but is there a consensus? i don't mean absolute consensus, but are we at least pointing in the same direction? if we are, i haven't seen it. and if we're not, is it too crazy to suggest that we work on a minimum agreement? ... answers to the following questions for each of those target markets. - What do we have to offer? - What are we missing? - What are we doing to fill the gaps? - What could we be doing that we're not? - How can we get at the people involved? i agree 100%, and that's why i don't like the let's advertise, marketing will come later approach: what will you advertise (and how and to whom) if you don't have answers to those questions? A slogan is the core of most campaigns. With a theme and a suitable slogan we can start a little campaign. Because the theme and slogan will be vague ... advertising (amongst other things) builds positioning, and positioning IS the brand. you can't go for a certain positioning in people's minds, and the next year go for a completely different one... coherence is one of the keys in communication. if you're not gonna be coherent, you better don't say anything. so a slogan/theme can be vague, but it MUST be coherent with your positioning, which must be coherent trough time. for example, i've read the beautiful slogans many times, and that's obviously not coherent with the positioning i think we have (or should have). gnome is not simply beautiful (as in pretty with no other purpose), that's kde... gnome is elegant, cool, the beauty of simplicity like they said before (there you have one coherent slogan, which merges two of our core strenghts: elegance and ease-of-use). anyway, we can't discuss slogans without discussing positioning; that's my point. If we don't plan to target these people differently, then there isn't much point in targetting them separately. i still think we should target them differently (within the same coherent positioning, of course), but that's one more thing we should try to agree on, before proceeding in different directions. This was the list's problem from the start; I believe. I was intended to stimulate promotion -- not marketing. uh... ok. then maybe you chose the wrong name, and john williams wrote the wrong article :) * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. i never meant let's make developers our slaves :) i just said it'd be much more efficient if we sent user feedback (like the one i compiled) in the name of the gnome marketing team, with the endorsement of several gnome foundation directors. yes, i could file yet another bug in bugzilla in my name, but that doesn't sound like the optimal channel, does it? there's a reason why we are the gnome marketing team... I agree that we have a problem empowering people. People on the list seem to be waiting for direction (from you, me or Luis...). no i'm not waiting for anyone's direction; i have my own, thank you :) what i suggested is that we should ALL try to come up with a marketing strategy; this is supposed to be a team and not a sum of individual efforts. it's not like john makes the strategy and murray makes the advertising and andreas makes the posters; all those efforts must be coordinated and coherent, because minimum consensus must be reached within any team, no matter the cost. and when i talked about huge names, i wasn't asking for direction but endorsement for particular actions. How good is our feedback loop? What Santiago is saying, if I understand correctly, is that right now we don't seem to have one, and one would be nice. that's exactly what i was saying: if we have no effective channel to deliver the feedback we gather, towards the ones who should be getting it (developers), what's the point in collecting that feedback? * There's no way to break
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
En/na Dave Neary ha escrit:
I forgot spreadgnome.org (although I think we should choose another
name). A community promotion site is essential for all this.
Why the GNOME promotion can't fit in gnome.org? In my opinion gnome.org
without prefixes should be mainly a GNOME promotion site: about, facts,
success stories, press releases, marketing materials, merchandising,
GNOME promotion kit, gateways to the next layout of collaboration with
the GNOME project... (all of them with prefixes: foundation, developer,
art, live, planet and so on).
I was thinking what are the GNOME entry points. gnome.org should be the
main one but there are more.
In my own case ('early adopter' could be my label) I remember
gnomedesktop.org and gnomesupport.org looked like the access points.
What do you think about these sites? Then the GNOME Hispano meetings and
the GUADEC. gnome.org never gave much to me as an interested user.
The planet was also interesting if you wanted to feel part of, even if
it was just by following it. Some posts were too technical but they
looked cool, specially when they attached colored code or graphics ;).
Some other looked to me offtopic offGNOME but since this is an open
community I guessed this was allowed, I thought.
Now I guess I'm inside and I have lost the perspective.
The entry points, we need to take care of them.
--
Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Santiago Roza wrote: it's not me, it's us. we are supposed to be a marketing team, so we're supposed to be focused in pretty much the same direction (not 100% the same, but at least the basics). that's why i'm trying to gather some consensus, instead of starting yet another individual uncoordinated effort. Consensus might not be desirable for the marketing team. On some things, sure - but we will need people acting as individuals, with all their quirks, as long as we're on the same page and all working. Roughly designated target markets exist already. While you don't think there's a huge concensus around these, I disagree. A big list of stuff we can do exists. We're not short actions. We need to put names to each of these. I'll put this list in the wiki later... * Create personas for each of our target markets * For each target market, identify - our strengths - market needs - our weaknesses - how we address them - our approach for the target (this could be done through the personas) * Initiate a couple of programs, with clear goals and a simple path for someone to spend a couple of hours on GNOME. University outreach and local government outreach are two that are doable with big potential. - University outreach: Have one person for each region get a list of university computer societies and contact details, and solicit their help. - Get them to organise GNOME presentations where someone from GNOME goes along to do a talk - Send out posters - Get IT department contacts for universities while we're at it. As the computer clubs, they'll know the people already. * Organise for each of the target markets. We need a shared rolodex for distribution, government, press and momentum user contacts. We need people who know who they are going to try to contact, how, what their message will be, what questions we'd like to ask, what we can do with the answers. * Develop a strategy for getting data gathered by the marketing team to developers. * Around our central theme of simplicity, usability, power to the user, work on posters, banners, get them printed and get them out to user groups and university outreach groups. They're no good if they never get seen. * Get involved in organising GUADEC. It's the most public face of the project, and some marketing is needed. People with press contacts, spare time, some clue about what our community expects from its flagship conference, subscribe to guadec-list and guadec-planning, or mail myself or Quim. ok you're pretty clear on that, but is there a consensus? Yeah. Claus disagrees with me on a couple of them, but we're all pretty much on the same page. i agree 100%, and that's why i don't like the let's advertise, marketing will come later approach: what will you advertise (and how and to whom) if you don't have answers to those questions? Well, what we have now is pretty good. We have a product, a user-driven design philosophy, a decent track record and a bunch of stuff we're proud of. Talking about what we're proud of is good. no i'm not waiting for anyone's direction; i have my own, thank you :) Grand. What would you like to do, then? We can fix goals, but people have to drive themselves towards those goals. Communication is vitally important when we don't see each other face to face very often, so we have a list, we have a (very quiet) IRC channel, we have the GNOME Journal, we have the wiki, we will soon have, quite probably, a drupal. So: * Set goals * Let people off to drive towards those goals * Auto-correct course en route if we get off-course. What do you want out of the GNOME marketing team? What are you doing to get towards that goal? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Consensus might not be desirable for the marketing team. On some things, sure - but we will need people acting as individuals, with all their quirks, as long as we're on the same page and all working. i meant consensus on objectives, basic strategy, and a couple more things, not killing everyone's criterion :) Roughly designated target markets exist already. While you don't think there's a huge concensus around these, I disagree. yes we know there are many possible segments, but we haven't agreed on which ones to focus on. Grand. What would you like to do, then? all those things i wrote in my first email and their followups; basically changing our focus from advertising to real marketing. but again, i can't do that alone, since i like to see this as a team. there's no point in me working on a marketing strategy, if the rest of the team thinks that's a minor detail we shouldn't be wasting time with, while there are much more important things like advertising gnome (no matter gnome's positioning) to the people (no matter who the people are), ignoring external users' feedback because those are just meaningless gripes :) What do you want out of the GNOME marketing team? What are you doing to get towards that goal? i want us to be the ones who collect users' feedback, process it, pass it to developers in effective ways, and restart the process with each release. and of course, the ones who analyse gnome's strenghts and weaknesses (either real or perceived) in relation to users' needs, and design a brand strategy based on that. then we can design a comunicational strategy, in order to advertise effectively (and with a sound basis). what i am doing towards that goal? well first i'm trying to get as many of us as possible behind my proposal, and then i guess i could be contributing with most of those tasks. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) this sounds interesting, but it also sounds like dozens of hours of work... and unluckily i can't afford to waste that kind of time until we have decent channels of communication with the developers. and i say waste not because i don't think the job is interesting, but because i'm afraid it'll end up in the (gnome :P) trashcan just like the 2.12 feedback list. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:21:17PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: Well said, and I concur. cool! one reply, and it wasn't an insult! :P Well, I hope our community isn't so bad as that one would expect insults and ridicule when giving critical feedback! :P :) sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Well, I hope our community isn't so bad as that one would expect insults and ridicule when giving critical feedback! :P no not at all, it was just a joke. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 03:44:20PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) this sounds interesting, but it also sounds like dozens of hours of work... and unluckily i can't afford to waste that kind of time until we have decent channels of communication with the developers. and i say waste not because i don't think the job is interesting, but because i'm afraid it'll end up in the (gnome :P) trashcan just like the 2.12 feedback list. It's our achilles heel. We are really bad at making decisions and we seem to have a microcsm of that going on here as well. :-) The usability list probably got trashed because nobody had the drive to smack this through. rant if we picked a good VCS that allows us to try out ideas that fit into marketing, usability or what not without having to worry about trust; decision-making would be a lot easier. /rant sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 11:37:24AM +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Claus Schwarm wrote: * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. Ahem. The board *shouldn't* do that. Not the same thing. We are a sub-group of the GNOME project. If we have some suggestions for Nautilus, backed up with real user feedback, I am sure we will have more weight than any old Joe Bloggs. We haven't tested the theory yet, though. Not true. The decision to use spatial in nautilus was done by a lot of talking to Alex and Dave by the usability team. It took them awhile to convince them to do it. So it's possible to convince devs. In fact, I would argue that the newer maintainers are a lot less anal about things than those in the past. Using bugzilla and a little data, and maybe some kind of test environment to show it. (ahem.. see prev rant. ) sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Santiago Roza wrote: not particularly. It's beautiful to a very strange niche. a very strange niche... that seems to be a bigger userbase than ours :( anyway, i wasn't saying kde looks good (cause it doesn't imho), but it does focus on pretty with no other purpose, while we don't. so we shouldn't be pushing that concept, cause that would be suicidal positioning :) In general, I think we should avoid the KDE vs GNOME rhetoric. Not just because we're on the same side (free software desktop), but also because we lose sight of the 95% market share monster if we get caught up in turf wars. If you want to compare GNOME to something, compare it to windows or MacOS X. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Desktop personas (draft)
Le mardi 06 décembre 2005 à 18:08 +0100, Dave Neary a écrit : Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) Just as a quick reply because it seems like a good way to structure marketing efforts: there are three groups of desktop personas: 1. private 2. business 3. public sector 1. private personas 1.1 Youngster - The youngster is roughly between 15 and 25 years old and still in the education system (school/college/university). The computer is more than a tool - it is a natural part of his/her life. On the desktop he uses a browser to surf the net (with the typical media plug-ins), email, instant messaging and an office suite (text, spreadsheet, presentation). He is open to blogging and may have a blog himself. VOIP will save him money on long distance calls. He typically owns an mp3 player, a digital camera and a mobile phone and wants to connect them to his computer. He will do basic image manipulation and likes to manage his collection of photos and videos. He does not care about free because his software is already free - he has enough friends who give it to him. Important is that his computer just works. Bluescreens, long texts vanishing suddenly into nirvana, reinstalls, viruses and spyware drive him nuts. He will like to plug-in a USB printer or a scanner and it just works. He does not care about backups but will be more than happy to figure out that somebody else did for him when it becomes necessary. Can be reached on open days / events and simply next door 1.2 Literate Knows how to use a computer. Uses internet and an office suite. Needs less than the youngster but will be happy to make his tax declaration at the end of the year. Probably has some kids and likes kids software too. Can be reached on open days / events and simply next door 1.3 Illiterate -- Grew up with the mechanical typewriter. Still likes it simplicity - put paper in, type, finished. Falls therefore immediately in love with the google homepage. Prefers abiword over openoffice and still thinks it has way to many menues, buttons and options. Uses computer to write and print texts, write emails and surf the internet. Would be very happy to manage his photos from his digital camera and do basic image operations like contrast, brightness, resize, crop. Can be reached on open days / events and simply next door 2. business persona == 2.1 small business - free appeals to him - office suite, email, browser - hates viruses and spyware - likes vino if a knowledgable person sits on the other end - simply does not know what OSS can do for him - feels good to hear about success stories - can be reached on open days / events and simply next door 2.2 medium business 2.3 corporate [novell, redhat, ibm, canonical and others care about them] 3. public sector persona = - schools, colleges/universities, administration - free appeals to them (both beer and freedom) - no viruses appeals to them - feels good to hear about success stories - can be reached on open days / events, direct contact Well, one can write way more, but that is what quickly comes out of my fingers. Marcus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I don't really want to start a thread on VCS here. But see this thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2005-May/msg1.html My long ass post about it is in: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2005-May/msg00036.html Hope that helps. sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
cool... could you throw it in the wiki so we can build on it? i'd do it myself, but i don't think i should appear as the original author :) -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
