Moving Fedora Marketing Forwards ================================ I've been way out of the Fedora loop lately, but I wanted to try and get some thoughts down that might provoke some conversations about what the marketing team should be doing, how we work, and how we can become more effective in the future. Apologies if no one finds this long winded rant useful. I hope that people might be interested in holding a meeting dedicated to some of these issues and planning for the Fedora 11 release cycle in the near future, but I think the mailing list is probably the most accessible place to bring plenty of people in on the conversation. I hope in the near future to try and pick up some of these things myself, especially considering I have two out of the next four weeks where my time will be much more my own. What the team does now ---------------------- As things stand, it seems to me that the main activities related to marketing Fedora are: * FPL's release interviews * Ambassadors events * Documenting media coverage on the mailing list * Occassional developer interviews * Occassional blog posts & articles pimping features/community * Responding to and correcting articles that are inaccurate Re: Fedora Of these, the marketing team, as a *team* are responsible for 3 (although this is largely done by Rahul) and now 6. Red Hat PR are responsible for 1 and for the most part 5. Correct me if I'm wrong here. How the team works now ---------------------- We largely co-ordinate via the mailing list, with sometimes weekly meetings that track the task list closely. Conclusions ----------- Seems like we could be doing a lot more as a team. How can we improve? ------------------- * We made a marketing plan this year, it establishes what we want to be promoting and what we think the project is about * We should create a *time based* marketing plan that ensures we have things to be doing, promoting, throughout the release cycle * We need to do this asap to make sure that we have lots prepared for the F11 release cycle * We need to work closer with Red Hat PR. * Not sure how this can work better, but a lot of stuff seems to happen that no one outside RH ever realises. (Correct me if I'm wrong) * Have no idea if RH PR take advantage of work that the community does, is our work just going to waste? * We need to work closer with the board, and all other parts of the project, to ensure that we're actually representing what people believe they're doing. * Related to this, we should be working with websites and docs to shepherd the content on the static pages * We should record media coverage of Fedora on the wiki instead of just on the mailing list. Make a good historical archive and provide us with the opportunity to better track how Fedora is perceived outside of our own community across releases. * Could even make a good static page and promotional material. On the front page, "Read what people are saying about Fedora. Click here." * We should create a central location for people to come and learn about what's happening in Fedora and our wider community * I still believe that a Fedora Magazine style project is the best way to do this * We should consider establishing a more formal organisation for the project, as well as thinking about how to make the best use of meeting time. * Having been out of the loop, I'm not really qualified to comment on the current state here, but that aside I beleive: * Meetings should be less about tracking progress (this is easily done *quickly* on the mailing list) * Meetings should be much more about exploring new tasks that we want to persue, goals, ways to achieve these. Notes ----- I also believe that it may be worth reassesing our marketing priorities. Our attempts to present Fedora as the innovative distribution, claiming credit for features that our community creates and pushes upstream first seemed to be successful this time last year; now the same features that I thought we'd successfully gained recognition for as created in Fedora are being attributed to other distributions as they integrate it, without even acknowledging that Fedora has feature parity. I don't know if this is our failing or whether this is just the result of the internet being full of people who have easy access to a large audience and don't even bother to thoroughly research what they're going to say. It begs the question, however, if promoting Fedora as a distribution based on the features it contains is the right thing to be doing. -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
