Re: Marketing, GNOME 3.0 and subteams

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com> wrote:

Hi,

strictly speaking, you forgot the most important point:

    What do we want people to do?

Marketing is just a means to help sell the product (or, at least, to help the sales team sell the product). Since we have no sales team, that's probably part of the job description here, too.

On top of my head:

 (1) Make end-users use GNOME3. (end)

I think we need to think about why we want end-users to use GNOME 3.0. Or why we want them to use GNOME at all. Those are the messages we can market. (And we know these, freedom, accessibility, usability, etc.)
 

 (2) Make end-users select a distribution that ships GNOME3. (means)

We can probably leave this one to the distributions we work with in (6).
 

 (3) Make opinion leaders (bloggers, twitters, etc.) write about GNOME3. (means)
 (4) Make journalists write about GNOME3. (means)
 (5) Make third-part developers use GNOME3 platform features. (means)

This will probably go a long way towards making all the others happen and as we discussed, it's a strength of ours.
 

 (6) Make distributions ship GNOME3. (means)

And we have adboard contacts we can work with. I think we need to involve companies more in the GNOME 3.0 process. Not from a marketing perspective but from a development perspective. If we want them to ship GNOME 3.0, they need to feel like they had some say in it.

(FYI, I asked all the advisory board members to ask their marketing folks to join this list. I haven't heard back from anyone ...)
 

 (7) Make GNOME developers provide the relevant information. (means) 

That's probably a better way to figure out what could be done. For example, you forgot to mention ideas concerning (6) and (7).

Of course, we would need ideas why these people should be willing to do what we want them to do. The typical benefits: to have more time or more money or higher status or more, uhm, social relations or a combination thereof.

Yeah, the word "Make" doesn't sit very well. It should probably be "incentivize" or "encourage" Or "make it compelling for ..." ....

Additionally, mere statements usually don't sell. We need to provide proof for any statement. Typical "proofs": Testimonials (thus (3), (4), (5)) or Data (case studies, experiments, financial or technical stats, measurements, etc. -- thus (7)).

For example, a typical benefit for (4) is fame (or reputation): to have access to exclusive information. Journalists gain nothing if they write about stuff everybody writes about. Something similar holds for distributions: They don't gain anything by shipping what everybody else ship. But an existing hype about GNOME3 might bring them more users. Also, a potential benefit for (5) might be to sell their own applications. Without existing hype about GNOME3, they probably won't care about it either.

So what about offering selected partners in (4), (5), and (6) an exclusive media partnership? They either get special information (4), or special exposure (5), and (6). After all, we need a few selected distributions to ship GNOME3 shortly after release -- let's say two months --, otherwise we can't point end-users to the right addresses in our marketing materials.

I think that's a great idea if it sits well with the open source nature of our product.

All these parties can be addressed directly; no need for mass communication here.

We also need a means to help people do (3), (4), (5). They need to test GNOME3 to be able to write about it. LiveCD? Images for virtual PCs? Autopackage for applications?

Agreed. We need to make it easy for journalists and bloggers to see what we are doing. Maybe it's LiveCD's, virtual images and time to interview developers.

Whatever the concrete plan, (7) is important to make all other stuff work. So, the core question is probably: Who's going to do that and how? :)

Best regards,
Claus

Stormy

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> wrote:

Hi GNOME Marketing folks,

With GNOME 3.0 in the works, I think it makes sense for us to come up with a GNOME 3.0 marketing plan.

+ Identify our target audience(s). Do we want to communicate with existing GNOME users, all free desktop users, or try to reach out to non-free-desktop users? (I think we can safely leave communicating with developers up to the developers themselves.)
+ Identify our key messages. What's new/interesting/cool about GNOME 3.0. Who will it benefit? How?
+ Create a roll out and strategy. Do we want to have timed "press releases" maybe every three months or so? With these we could work with journalists - we need to have something interesting for them to say on a regular basis.
+ Press team. Maybe put together a small team of developers, documentation people and marketing people to roll out the messages and be key contacts.
+ Presentations. It would be really helpful to have some prepared presentations with slides and speaking points for people willing to help spread the word. They could use the presentations as given or they could use parts of it or adapt it to their audience. But by having something prepared, we have a better chance of communicating the message we want.

Anything else that should go on the list?

I think we can discuss each point in it's own thread and maybe even create subteams.

Stormy

--

marketing-list mailing list
marketing-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list