Forwarded message sent by Eldo Valghese to Jane Silber and her reply, for the interest of the Marketing Team. (Yes, I asked them first :) )
Jenda -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Marketing Ubuntu and Community Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:09:48 +0100 From: Jane Silber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Eldo Varghese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CC: Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Malcolm Yates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jan Vancura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Corey Burger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chris Kenyon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hi Eldo, Jan - Thanks for getting in touch. I think there are a lot of talented and enthusiastic people in the marketing team, and we have the opportunity to have a fantastic team. I welcome your involvement and initiative. Many of the best projects are ones that come from the community, so I am hesitant to make suggestions. For example, the SpreadUbuntu project you are working on looks fantastic - I am very excited to see the live site! I also think that the general organisation of the team, the wiki pages, the clear list of projects are all fantastic. I think some of the projects have had a bit of a slow start, but that's fine - the ones that catch people's interest and enthusiasm will flourish and I personally think it is better to have a smaller number of solid, well run initiatives than a bunch that no one is interested in. As for your point about Canonical involving the community in our marketing activities, please understand that there is very little marketing that happens at Canonical. We have no one working on marketing as a full time job, and up until recently our marketing plan consisted entirely of the ShipIt program (i.e., sending free CDs). We are extending those efforts now as we start to prepare press releases and build corporate relationships with ISVs and OEMs, but there is still a pressing need for and large opportunity for the community marketing effort. We also are in the process of making some new hires, which will help in this regard (see http://www.ubuntu.com/employment for more info on that). I think there are still some technical barriers in the team (the old forums vs mailing list divide), but with understanding and acceptance that different people have different work styles, we should be able to overcome those. Most other Ubuntu teams organise themselves in mailing lists and on the wiki (which I see the Marketing Team doing to some degree as well). So I think you are doing all the right things already. In response to your specific request, I have listed a couple concrete suggestions, but none of the following are radical departures from where you already are. Of course when/how/if you want to follow up on these is your call. 1. Matt Galvin and others from the Doc Team have started a weekly newsletter to inform people about what's happening in various corners of the growing Ubuntu community. It would be great to see a Marketing Team update in there on a regular basis (just as it would be great to see updates from the Forums, from the Art Team, etc in each issue). That will help promote your activities within the community, recruit new members/ideas, and raise the profile of the projects the Marketing team undertakes. (This will also help with the technical barriers, as people who don't like to use forums will have a way to know what's going on in ubuntupeople.org.) 2. I think it would be interesting to look at the activities of the Marketing Teams of other open source projects (Linux distributions and upstream projects) and see what has worked well for them. There is a lot of experience there that we may be able to learn from. 3. One of the strengths of our community is its size and geographic reach. It would be good for the marketing team to take advantage of that, and one way that could happen is for the marketing team could become the focal point for the community press initiative. This would need to be done in collaboration with the LoCo Teams, who focus on their particular region. It would be nice if we had a single reference site for the LoCo Teams to help them learn how to market Ubuntu in their area. There are a number of directions this could take, but for right now let's think about press relations, as I suspect there is knowledge and expertise in the Marketing Team in this area that isn't present in all LoCo Teams. Therefore, the Marketing Team could develop an initiative that encompasses a press strategy (and supporting materials) for LoCo Teams to implement, with a goal of local articles/press coverage. We already do a pretty good job of getting coverage in large established IT press. Where we have less coverage is in the smaller, local publications and that's exactly the kind of thing that we should be able to target given our geographic reach. Having a "how to" guide for LoCo Teams would help them immensely. I would imagine that the "how to" includes basic info like identifying journalists, having a good set of materials that can be used as background information (and which LoCo Teams can translate), what messages to deliver in interviews, what _not_ to say in interviews, etc. 4. Case studies/user stories. Because Ubuntu is free and we don't ask for any registration, etc., we often don't know about some amazing and exciting Ubuntu deployments. This is another place where the breadth of the community can help, particularly the marketing team. Obviously one aspect of marketing is to deliver a message, to get information out. But an equally important piece is to collect information and pull it back into the community. Therefore, it might be interesting to have an initiative which collects information/stories about significant or interesting or inspiring Ubuntu use stories. I'm not really thinking about the "my grandmother uses it" type of stories (although those can be interesting and inspiring), but rather larger deployments (schools, companies, local projects, governments, etc). Figuring out how to collect and publish these stories is a vital part of Ubuntu marketing. I would love to see a "Ubuntu deployment of the week" feature (but with a catchier name) on the Ubuntu website, the Fridge and/or in the Weekly newsletter. FWIW, Canonical plans to do something along these lines but we just haven't had the time/resources to devote to it yet. These are just some ideas. Again, I think the Marketing Team is already doing a good job and I'm not trying to redirect you from current initiatives to these - I'm just trying to answer your request for suggestions of what else you could do. Hope this helps Cheers, Jane Eldo Varghese wrote: > Hello > My name is Eldo Varghese (poningru on IRC & elsewhere), an Ubuntu > community member (not official yet). While > thinking about marketing of FLOSS projects in general and > having a discussion with Corey, I became aware of the > lack of community involvement in centralized marketing of Ubuntu. > I believe it is from a combination of community members not being > bold enough and showing initiative in working with Canonical > employees as well as from Canonical marketing members not going far > enough in the community to get a marketing team up and running. > The latter point may seem a bit unfair to you guys, I have > observed all three of you in the marketing mailing list, but sadly > have not seen everyone in www.ubuntupeople.com or the irc channel > #ubuntu-marketing. Please do not take my observations as being > accusatory, I am simply saying you guys already have many jobs on > top of PR to be worrying about it. If the forums on ubuntupeople.com > do not seem like a good place for organizing marketing, > please do suggest an alternative. I have agreed on this subject with > Jenda and others from within the team. > Now regarding my point about community not showing enough > initiative, well this email is it... How can I help? Need help with > that press release? What can I do to make your marketing duties a > little better (any duties for that matter ;)) > - Eldo Varghese (poningru) > - Jan Vancura (jenda) -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
