Gregory, If I may permit myself a comment as an outsider. I am the marketing coordinator over at Sugar Labs, a FLOSS project which works closely with Fedora and other distros; I like to keep an eye on what other FLOSS projects are doing about marketing. In my day job, I work at a Fortune 500 company in the top 30 of Ad Age's Global Marketers list by advertising spend. I can guarantee you doing marketing for any engineer-heavy FLOSS structure is a lot of work, and not just getting the work done, but convincing engineers of its usefulness. Most engineers I know have a healthy dislike for marketing as mere "spin" or "prettifying" and have horror stories to tell of proprietary software companies asking engineers to rewrite the laws of physics to make a deadline thought up by "clueless marketers". Even the category is conceptually displaced: most engineers think "marketing" means reaching other engineers, not presenting products or services to targets with a strategy. The do-it-yourself ethos of FLOSS communities means everyone feels competent enough to write press release copy, with catastrophic results; some PR never goes any further than an obscure blog post. Cultivating journalists is unheard-of. Marketing folk are often not informed what is going on, usually because engineers consider their input superfluous. When in doubt, FLOSS engineers cite examples from other FLOSS projects, most of whom have awful marketing as well. Engineers think in terms of "releases", and getting them to think of "launches" instead is an uphill climb. Under these conditions, it's no surprise that all GNU/Linux distros together amount to under 2% market share on the desktop. However, engineers like results, and know them when they see them. Most of them will set aside prejudices and listen to reasoned arguments; recognition of expertise in FLOSS projects is earned, not announced. And a great many developers understand that FLOSS marketing is underdeveloped, but are frustrated because they are not sure how to do better, and are eager to learn from anyone not talking jargon. Marketers-communicators can help, but it requires patience and fortitude inside the project. Marketing methods, concepts, tactics, branding, advertising, are foreign to engineers. So we have an extra challenge: explaining, and explaining again, and then again, how we come up with a marketing plan, based on knowledge of our targets (from studies, or surveys, or focus groups, or whatever we have), ideas on how to reach targets, what the messages are, what metrics to use to measure results, and of course the limited resources available. At Sugar Labs, from time to time I write messages like this one http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-March/000681.html as mini-tutorials about the world marketers move in, so mysterious to most engineers. Many colleagues pass by such messages as pie-in-the-sky fluff, but there will always be some who are very sharp and willing to learn, and sometimes the colleagues will sit up and take notice that those whom they respect are listening, and they will listen too. Of course it's hard to contribute time and money and for others to disrespect your work. Let me give you an example. When I arrived at Sugar Labs at the beginning of this year, I asked about branded USB sticks. There were none, just a CG image (which provided free advertising to Belkin, since the image was spidered by Google). The marketing budget ($0) meant no sticks. Yet I knew beauty shots of logo'd sticks were absolutely necessary from a branding standpoint. Seed money is often an issue in FLOSS projects. So I fronted a thousand USD to Sugar Labs to get a hundred sticks done in several colors. The sticks themselves were gone in a "flash" to qualified prospects at education shows, but the few we set aside wound up in our current beauty shot (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Sugar-on-a-Stick-Strawberry-cs.jpg) done by a talented photographer friend and which has been widely published, for example by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8117064.stm). The result? We have been plumb out of sticks for months, but the branding initiative has brought us closer to finding funders who will help us get quite a lot more sticks done. Naturally, the last time a developer suggested that marketers were useless, I had to count to ten to cool off. But cool off I did... for the good of the project. May I suggest you work a little more with the Fedora marketing team. Give them a chance, let them see what positive impact you can have, not by telling them what they may be doing wrong, but by suggesting how they can work better. Bring some results, your words will carry more weight as time goes on. Sean Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Gregory Zysk <gz.int.project@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dear Marketing, > > I have pondered over the question of; 'where to start?' > > After receiving the comments on this list which were supplemented by emails > supporting the fact that there is not much coordination in the area of > marketing, but more so the unwillingness to see the relevance of it, it > makes this a difficult mission. That combined with the questions I have > asked through email to the group leader who never replies to those mails > makes this impossible. > > There has been talk of people not wanting to look inside the organization, > but just want to focus on the outside. Like a doctor who takes care of the > sick but never takes care of themselves. He may help a lot of people, but > when he neglects his own health, he eventually ends up in a position where > he can no longer help others. > > I can really say that as a newbie to the FOSS community and someone who is > not a "techie" or paid to do this but looks at it as one of this social > responsibilities, I am really not too impressed. There is widespread > disagreement, as their is in many other FOSS communities also which leads me > to believe that this is a "members club" only. Those members being the > technically inclined. These technical people have jobs that either support > you to work on Fedora with their time and money or you are actually paid by > Fedora/Redhat.Those of "us" who do not fall under those categories are > putting all of our time with no supplemental payment. > > Therefore, I suggest you keep this a technical distro only, that way > everyone entering the community as well as it's users will have a foundation > to start from. Wider user bases than that need not apply. > > After many hours contemplating it and some sleepless nights, I have decided > where to start: Removing myself from this group! > > > > -- > Gregory Zysk > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Gmzysk > > Fingerprint: 4643 E1AE 1AAD 85D4 6276 > 7C42 3591 A189 B8BF 04D6 > > -- > Fedora-marketing-list mailing list > Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list > -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
