[GnomeMeeting-devel-list] GnomeMeeting 2.0 Promotion/Marketing (was: Interest for GM 2.00)

[CJ van den Berg <cj vdbonline com>]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 07:06:12PM +0100, Damien Sandras wrote:
> That you are right. Also, GnomeMeeting needs more marketing power. I
> sent a mail about that earlier this month, but got few feedback.

Well here are some more thoughts on GM promotion:

1. Get GM 2.0 into Gnome 2.14

This is by far the most important way to raise visibility of any Gnome
related application. I know from watching the Gnome lists that there is
a lot of excitement over GM 2.0 and I'm sure they will mention SIP
prominently in their new features list if GM 2.0 is ready for 2.14.
Gnome releases have a *huge* chain reaction marketing effect and if GM
2.0 with SIP support gets into 2.14 I'm sure you'll see literally
hundreds of articles world wide mentioning GM 2.0.

2. dbus interfaces and developer docs / examples

dbus is all the rage with the Gnome crowd and a working dbus interface
to a SIP endpoint in Gnome 2.14 will attract a lot of integration into
Gnome applications for 2.16. This should raise the project's visibility
a lot and could make GM more attractive. Developers are pretty good at
getting excited about other people's software when they have the ability
to quickly add it as a feature to *their* project.

3. Simple (really, simple) end user configuration help

Most users don't care about GM or VoIP or SIP or anything really - they
just want to make calls. A prominently placed webpage that shows in
simple steps how to configure GM for various popular VoIP providers
would be very encouraging to new end users. It also serves as a sort of
documentation of which VoIP providers GM is known to work with, which
is also positive no-bull marketing.


And last but definitely not least...
... and I hate to say it...

4. Change the name!

I know it's difficulty and no-one really wants to go through the
hassle, but GnomeMeeting *really* needs a better name. NetMeeting is
dead (at least in the public mind) and GnomeMeeting is *not* just a
clone anyway. The -Meeting name really associates the project too much
with video conferencing which is a niche application (at least compared
to VoIP) and will always stay that way. Simple is good though too, so I
would suggest something simple and catchy that says *exactly* what GM
does/is. For example, GnomePhone, GnomeVoice, GnomeTalk, etc.

If you really want to keep a strong association to the GnomeMeeting
name perhaps condensing it and adding a suffix or prefix might work too.
For example, GM-Voice, GM-Talk, VoIP-GM, etc. 

Anyway, as you probably noticed, none of these items are actually
*new*. They have all been talked about before and are AFAIK are on the
program from the GM 2.0 release. So I guess what it boils down to is,
push hard to get GM 2.0 out the door.

-- 
CJ van den Berg

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