On Sunday 03 June 2007, Mike Feravolo wrote: | Good Day People: | | Last Friday June 1, members of the Florida Loco helped me (Mike | Feravolo) sell Ubuntu to the East Orlando Business community at our | local chamber of commerce trade show.
Sell or advocate? Hopefully advocating, unless of course Ubuntu Florida is selling their services and putting the money back into the team. | Given the limited resources of our small business Ad Spend and the | nature of our business, we can't sell Ubuntu to the entire world. | However, will do our best at our local level and getting out there and | talking to as many people as we can one on one is the best way to do | that. Locally you shall succeed. Advocating Ubuntu and Free Software is a tricky thing. I have been doing it for a while and no matter the level of success, it is still success. Ubuntu Chicago truthfully doesn't do enough, however we have had a great level of success with the little that has been done. We have an advantage though, a lot of our members are college students, so advocating in an educational arena tends to be a little easier. | As an engineer I liked the way that Gerry Carr categorized people into | types.: | | TYPE 1 | a) new to Linux | b) heard of ubuntu but not ready/capable of downloading | c) wants reassurance that it is a familiar environment | | TYPE 2 | a) familiar with linux and/or ubuntu | b) wants to know what's new and cool in latest release | | However, all of the people which need to be sold on Ubuntu are "Type | One", the others are already sold or they are hard-core users of another | Linux distribution. I am not a fan of the term "sell" or "sold". I have had the privilege to work with many technical sales people through out the world, and selling tends to advocate inconsistencies and lies to "sell" a person on Ubuntu. Our goal should be to inform them on Ubuntu, in a way sow that seed (yes, bad Religious use of terminology). Selling Ubuntu onto someone sounds exactly like what Microsoft does. They lie to their users or potential clients, that is selling. Doing whatever in your power you can to get a person to switch. Gently informing and guiding a user by advocating is much better, and they tend to listen to you better when you aren't the person ringing their doorbell on Saturday morning trying to "sell" them a vacuum cleaner. | Our motives are simple we are computer scientists and engineers and we | sell our time and expertise. That's how we make our money. So why do we | want to help "Sell Ubuntu"? Why Not! because it can save our clients | money and we all are old UNIX hacks anyway. If you want to make money with Ubuntu, then I suggest becoming a certified partner, don't try and make money via the LoCo team, it is biased. One thing I have done is asked for a $1 donation for a CD and free install for new users who show up to an install event. That money though doesn't go to me, it goes right back into the LUG and/or the LoCo to use for advertising. My time is free when it comes to turning a new person on to the freedom that Ubuntu and more importantly free software provides to them. | So forget giving a client with a small office a bill that includes | $20,000 worth of software licenses when we don't get any of the money | anyway. Now, We can give them an Ubuntu option that will save them that | twenty "dimes" up front. That is a great advocational piece right there. That is the one thing they don't have to do with Linux and/or Ubuntu, so yes it does save them money. | There is your marketing right there. Wow! we didn't even have to say | anything good or bad about [deleted], we just gave them a price | comparison. That says it all! Yup. | Walmart isn't the largest employer right now in the United States, | because people here price shop for the highest price tag. But they don't | want anything for free, because they are afraid there is a catch. | | Which means that you could put together an Live CD edition of Ubuntu | that you could get out as an impulse buy for a token fee [of less then | five dollars] and then people would buy it. People do buy it if they want the DVD. I don't know if Canonical gets a cutback from it, but from my understanding is they don't. | Money collected from these impulse racks could be then be rolled back | into the production budget to recover the costs of the media. People | don't need to understand that software licensing is free, and just think | they are paying for a disk. | | Walmart would be the place to put them, right at the check out line next | to the five pack of Blank CD's. As long as the "Walmart Edition" both | carefully eliminated any fear to try it, while protecting the new users | from themselves. Many people have told me they were afraid to try the | Live-CD, because "they were afraid that it was going to delete all their | files". You know how much it costs to to something that small in Walmart? Plus, Walmart won't allow you to now with their trusty ol' Microsoft relationship. There are plenty of other locations that people frequent and they will allow you to put up a small thing of CDs to be handed out, however they won't allow you to charge for them. I have a few cases up at local Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Office Depots, Staples, Fry's Electronics, and small computer shops. I don't know about Florida, but here in Chicago, Walmart is the devil. Seeing as Chicago is a large mafia, I mean union city, Walmart is hated. More people hit the Targets and Meijers than anywhere else. In order to sell merchandise in places like Walmart, you have to be one of their buddies, and you have to pay a ton just to get a little. | Now, the artistic talents of our marketing team are required to make | these special Live CD's attractive and the copy writers get the message | straight and eliminate any fears. | | Sorry we are software engineers and we can't hold a pen straight. Good | thing for spell checkers or we would even know how to spell engineer. Who needs a pen when you have a keyboard :D -- Richard A. Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Key: 0x2E2C0124
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
-- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
